The Virginia Community College System received a National Science Foundation grant for an advanced technology education project called “Creating Pathways for New IT Professionals.” The project is focused on the educational programs of both two- and four-year colleges, and includes linkages, where appropriate, with high school programs.

The project managers believe that information technology (IT) graduates require deep technical skills, multidiscipline awareness, and the ability to deliver the value of those technical skills to clients. Therefore, the curriculum includes material on work ethics, interpersonal communications, motivation and initiative, and even emotional intelligence. Faculty development is also an important part of the project.

As a result of the project, a Consortium for IT Education in Virginia has been created to move these goals forward. The project managers eventually hope to provide dual enrollment and seamless pathways between two- and four-year IT programs, adopt IT curriculum guidelines for two- and four-year programs, and develop accreditation processes for two- and four-year IT programs.

Frankly, I was impressed with the practicality of this project. I had just read an article in an issue of Communications of ACM called “A common theme for IT degree programs” [1]. These authors also see the need for multidiscipline IT education, but their focus is much more technical. “We found a common set of knowledge areas we describe as the systems development process representing a focus that intersects the computing disciplines of computer science, information systems, IT, information science, and computer engineering.”

I think that even students in those lofty disciplines could learn from the Virginia project and add a strong dose of interpersonal communications, motivation and initiative, and emotional intelligence.