orace Jarrell quickly sizes up the maze of wires on the floor and skillfully begins to bring order out of chaos. He is a student at Central Georgia Technical College in Macon, and he is being judged on his Cisco Systems network competencies. If he can’t make the network function, he fails the examination. Jarrell, a 24-year-old Army veteran, doesn’t lose his cool.

Jim Wilson, his instructor, watches Jarrell and his classmates take this excruciating hands-on examination for a Cisco certificate of proficiency. The instructor has stripped the network board and thrown all of the wires to the floor. Even the connectors are ripped off some of the cables, and raw cabling must be fixed so that connections can be made.

“Our instructors do it this way, and everyone, so far, has passed this examination. They know that if they are the single network administrator with a small company, there is no one else to call upon when the network goes down. They have to know what to do—and they can do it,” says Dr. Mel Palmer, president of Central Georgia Technical College. The trial-under-fire may seem a harsh introduction to the world of information technology, but it draws Georgia’s technical students like bees to flowers, making honey. Thousands of students using thousands of computers, associated network equipment and peripheral devices are learning how to make good money in the age of information technology. They will soon be at the heart of IT, making the whole intricate system work for the rest of us.

The Department of Technical and Adult Education is playing a leading role in filling the need for competent employees who make the information revolution click. Central Georgia Technical College alone has 41 modern labs with about 1,300 computers. Its Computer Information Systems program had 158 students enrolled in 1995. By fall 2000, enrollment was 944.

Georgia—and the rest of the nation—simply can’t get enough workers trained to feed the gigantic hunger for information technology.

“We have created a dependency for all kinds of information, and people are thirsty for it,” Wilson says. “This dependency won’t ever stop, and we’d better start training people to meet these needs.”

A recent Georgia Board of Regents study says that even with incredible expansion of courses in information technology, there is “an almost insatiable demand” for high-tech employees. These are not just computer employees, but workers in fields such as medical technology, data processing, fiber optics and satellite communications.

Central Georgia Tech is playing a leading role to furnish the trained students business and industry must have. It is not alone, however. All of DTAE’s 34 technical colleges, 16 satellite centers and associated college programs offer a multitude of courses in information technology. There are more than 100 courses in basic to advanced technologies. Students may choose from competency certificates for specific vendors, such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems, to diplomas and associate degrees in information technology areas. And for students not able to enroll in on-campus programs, there’s the new Georgia Virtual Technical College. Its home is in cyberspace, and its online instruction is proving extremely popular with students. (See GVTC article)

Horace Jarrell, who we saw putting a Cisco network back together, was drawn to information technology and will soon be finished with his program at Central Georgia Tech. He was in the Army from 1995 to 1999 and spent time at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where he worked with a system backing up Pentagon telecommunications. He came to Central Georgia Tech in 1999 and will finish his IT training in December 2001. He already has several certificates proving his expertise with Microsoft programs and Cisco Systems networking chores. “I’d like to work for a Fortune 500 company in network engineering,” he says.

And the chances are excellent Jarrell will get a job he likes—and at excellent pay. His instructor says students with just basic experience in IT areas can expect to pull down $25,000 to $35,000 annually. Those with some experience frequently can command up to $60,000 a year. “Some of our students will even make a six-digit salary,” he says.

Central Georgia Technical College has formed its Center of Excellence for Information Training and Technology in cooperation with Microsoft’s authorized academic training program and the training programs of Cisco Systems. Similar partnerships with leading IT companies are in place at schools from the northern to the southern extremes of Georgia, from Northwestern Technical College (near the Tennessee border) to Okefenokee Technical College in Waycross. In these partnerships, students must pass rigorous exams prepared jointly by the industries and the technical college system.

Students who pass these exams have an extraordinary “job-hook.” The downsizing and slackening economy has not made a dent in the total number of workers needed to meet the nation’s IT needs.

Instructors and college officials interviewed say that any really serious IT student can get a good job. Sheryl Huggins is a 41-year-old grandmother from Reynolds, west of Roberta. She has two grown daughters and a granddaughter. “I’ve worked, but I haven’t had the real skills to make the income I want,” she said in an interview in a lab at Central Georgia Tech. “My husband has a lot of health issues, and he pushed me to think about a career to take care of myself.”

She will get a diploma specializing in computer network administration. She also hopes to get an associate degree.

“The quality of teaching is simply unbelievable here. You get individual attention as well as excellent instruction,” Huggins says. “It won’t be hard at all to get a job in Atlanta, where my husband already works, and we’ll be able to live there.”

Dr. Ray Brooks, president of Northwestern Technical College, early on saw the need for more IT emphasis at his own and other technical colleges in Georgia. He took a leading role in updating curricula, and his school has the latest in state-of-the-art labs and a fiber-optic “backbone” network to give access to information technology. He also pioneered the foundation of the Georgia Virtual Technical College online instruction program. (See GVTC article) Northwestern Tech offers 19 different courses for online delivery and had 498 students enrolled for the cyber-courses last year.

All the networking and outfitting of Northwestern’s labs was done by the students themselves, representing tremendous savings.

Nikki McDowell, a Northwestern Tech student, will soon have a diploma as a network specialist. “The hands-on instruction is what has been the best in my program,” she explained.

No-nonsense, high-tech industries respect what DTAE is doing to turn out highly educated and skilled students to meet business needs. Microsoft has given Central Georgia Tech national honors for its high-quality work. Other major high-tech companies working in partnership with the state’s technical colleges include Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Novell and Comptia. These companies actively work with the technical colleges to design courses relevant to industry needs. Curricula standards have been set with their direct involvement.

And employers know that with each Georgia technical college student they hire comes a guarantee of competence. If the new employee can’t meet company standards, the technical college will retrain the employee at no cost to the employee or employer. None of us knows just where the information technology revolution will take us—whether we are everyday citizens or technology experts. But as Central Georgia Tech instructor Jim Wilson says: “We are more and more dependent on the transfer and availability of information. Sixty percent of us are already on the Internet. No medium has ever been adopted faster than the Internet. Whatever the direction taken, Georgia’s technical colleges will be in the lead to turn out competent, well-educated students who can get good jobs and serve business and their communities.”