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diggCatch the rebound
Local college program trains Hispanic students for IT jobs.
The tech boom is back, and a local program offers Latinos scholarships to enter information technology careers.
Mesa Community College’s Business & Industry Institute’s ACE-IT Program will pay for tuition and books for an associate’s degree. The courses are taught in English or Spanish. The program’s acronym stands for Advanced Career Education in Information Technology program, which MCC developed to guide Latino students into the well-paying IT workforce.
Mesa CC, Maricopa Workforce Connection’s One Stop Career Center, and Chicanos Por La Causa, Inc., have partnered in this project to train Hispanic IT employees.
The growing IT industry is in need of younger, more diverse workers, says Steven Rubenstrunk, manager of the institute. Expanding use of the Internet by businesses and individuals is fueling the job growth now and for the future, he says.
"The Hispanic community is severely underrepresented in the IT industry," Rubenstrunk says. He says the need for IT employees will spurt in the next four to six years.
InformationWeek, a tech industry magazine, recently reported that "more Americans were employed in IT than at any time in the nation’s history" in the first quarter of 2006. The majority of the jobs available now are either highly technical or entry to mid-level, such as programmer, analyst or project leader.
Dice.com, an online job board for technology and engineering professionals, reports that the tech market is thriving, with job postings rising 31 percent over last year.
Rubenstrunk says the IT specialists who were part of the so-called "dotcom" technology boom – and bust – from 1997 to 2001 are retiring. When the dotcom bubble burst, thousands of Internet tech companies who raised millions in venture capital suffered spectacular failures. One was Phoenix-based quepasa.com, a company that raised and lost more than $90 million (see article on page xx.)
Today’s comeback has been called a "kinder, gentler" dotcom boom. The steady job-market improvement creates opportunities for Latinos, Rubenstrunk says.
"The different levels we offer can lead to manager skills that will allow you to move into high-paying jobs in an IT career," he says.
The program’s levels range from 1 to 5, with Levels 1 to 2 providing basic computer skills to entry-level skills. Entry-level jobs pay an average of $10 an hour, he says.
Levels 3 to 5 provide higher training that leads to executive IT positions. The pay for these positions range from $30,000 beginning salary to $60,000 for those with three to five years’ experience, Rubenstrunk says. Most jobs come with good benefits.
The ACE-IT scholarship is especially suited to Latinos, including such special features as:
• Free tuition and books
• ESL classes, for students who need to learn English while learning job skills
• ESL classes running concurrently with tech courses
• Bilingual instructors teaching the tech training classes
• Evening classes
• A free phone consultation for men and women with questions about the program and a tech career.
The classes will be held at Mesa Community College’s downtown campus, 145 N. Centennial Way, Mesa. Students must be 18 years or older, have the right to work in the United States, pass a seventh-grade reading and math exam, and be available for an interview.
Students can apply for both scholarship and program through Maricopa’s One Stop Workforce connection. Call Remy Atencio at One Stop, (480) 497-0350, Ext. 210. Also, students can contact Jose Cortez with Chicanos Por La Causa, Inc., (602) 269-6485.
