HEPC, Microsoft announce new deal

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A new partnership between the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and Microsoft Corporation promises to offer unique training to West Virginia students.

The two entities announced the agreement Monday in Morgantown. It offers the Microsoft IT Academy to all public higher educational institutions in West Virginia.

“We’re very fortunate to find a great partner in West Virginia,” said Jamie Harper, general manager of Education and Microsoft. “We launched this program earlier with K-12 in the summertime in West Virginia and now we’ve launched it in the higher education institutions.”

The program enables high school graduates who’ve taken the IT Academy courses in high school to build on their knowledge of computer training and gain a higher level of skill. Harper said the program covers a wide range of skills, all of which will be valuable in a variety of career paths.

“More and more employers need basic IT skills in all their incoming workers,” Harper said. “It starts from basic computer literacy all the way through database technology to programming. It really is a wide-range of options.”

Even if students have no desire to be a computer programmer, they can still glean valuable skills from the certification making them more marketable once they have graduated in their chosen degree field.

“Being able to do anything from a spread sheet up to programming is going to give them an opportunity they wouldn’t have had in the past,” said Higher Education Policy Commission Chairman Dr. Bruce Berry.

Previously, if students wanted or needed a Microsoft Certification for their training they were on their own finding it. Typically, the programs were taught in condensed sessions and came at great cost. Now the programs are integrated into the normal course of school work and since they are online are much more flexible in when they can be learned. This is a big asset to those in the state’s two year community and technical schools.

“Before they were having to get them through private, for profit companies,” said Dr. Sarah Tucker, vice chancellor of the Community and Technical College System of West Virginia. “Students were spending four to five thousand dollars because of multiple-day condensed training. They were having to pay for hotels, meals and other things now they can get them through their institutions and get them at a fraction of the cost.”





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