By Mary Beth Sheehan Guest columnist
Typically, my only involvement with this column is limited to being the person behind the e-mail address at the end of each week’s offering. However, today I am stepping into another role, that of guest columnist while Jim is away.
As the business development manager at Computer Bits, with responsibility for developing existing clients and procuring new ones, I have had the pleasure of working with Jim and eight other consultants, all male, for almost seven years. That fact is probably what made me pay particular attention a couple of weeks ago when I was riding my bike one evening past the front entrance of Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, my alma mater. The sign at the 99th Street circle drive entrance announced the upcoming Geek Squad Summer Academy. I was very intrigued.
Even though when I graduated from college with a business degree, I didn’t have much of a clue regarding what I wanted to do, I was fortunate and stumbled into the information technology arena. For almost two decades, I have worked around or in IT consulting, and the dearth of women in this field has always puzzled me. As a graduate of McAuley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was exposed to countless young women during who were every bit as intelligent and capable as the many talented men that I’ve met in the workplace. Yet somehow the vast majority of them did not gravitate toward technology when it came time to choose their careers.
I spoke last week with Sue Barnett, McAuley’s director of development, who filled me in on the details of Geek Squad Summer Academy. According to Barnett, 150 McAuley students attended the first four-day session, while 155 junior-high students attended the second session.
Through what sounds like a very well thought-out, creative and age-appropriate curriculum, the girls were exposed to simplified versions of many of the issues that my co-workers tackle on a daily basis.
Granted, by the time these students are out in the “real world,” the challenges in the IT field will probably be much different, but the critically important point is that they are starting to build a knowledge base that they can continue to leverage against for the rest of their lives.
As anyone in IT well knows, traditional classroom learning only goes so far in our field. In order to succeed and prosper, good IT consultants have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable about the practical applications involved with many different aspects of technology, proficient at deductive reasoning, patient and able to interact with a variety of different client personality types.
The deep knowledge requirement can only be met by hours and hours of hands-on problem solving, much like the academy’s fortunate attendees experienced.
McAuley was evidently the national pilot site for this program for the Geek Squad (the connection is Geek Squad employee and McAuley alum Maura Hardek). Barnett said that she believed that this technology-based experiment was a “smashing success.”
She cited two examples: First, some of the attendees stated that they did not have any previous interest in technology, but by the end of the academy they were much more open to considering technology as a future career option; second, the comment of one attendee’s mom, who shared that during the school year she had a lot of trouble rousing her daughter out of bed for school every morning but that her daughter almost miraculously was up and ready on time each day of the academy, even though her start time was even earlier than during the school year. Anything that can get a teenager that charged up about attending “school” during the summer has to be an inherently good thing!
It took McAuley and the Geek Squad folks the better part of a year to move this idea from concept to reality. Kudos to the Geek Squad for investing in tomorrow’s work force as well as making the program so affordable for the girls (the entire cost of the program was underwritten by the Geek Squad, with the girls only having to pay a $20 registration fee).
And kudos as well to Mother McAuley for investing the time and resources necessary to bring such an innovative program to their Chicago Southland campus.
Without a doubt, McAuley’s Geek Squad Summer Academy is an idea whose time has come. Given the incredible current and future opportunities in the world of information technology, not to mention the opportunities in the countless fields that technology has touched and affected, the time is more than right for encouraging young women to give some serious consideration to this industry when it comes to their careers.
Jim Harmening is president of Computer Bits Inc., an Orland Park computer services company. Send questions to Jim in care of Mary Beth Sheehan at info@bitsmail.com or at www.computer-bits.com. Personal responses are not always possible. Questions may be used in future columns.