An Interview with Carroll McGillin: An Interview with Carroll McGillin, National Initiatives Manager for the Cisco Networking Academy

 ACTE: So tell us about the Cisco Networking Academy.

CM: The Cisco Academy has been in place for the past 11 years. It was launched in 1997. It is a unique public/ private partnership--with education, state, local and national governments and community organizations--that really focuses on providing students with the foundational and advanced skills and knowledge that are needed to begin an advanced career in networking and IT.

ACTE: Which institutions become academies?

CM: One of the exciting things as the program has matured is that we have academies from high school through to community college and into four-year institutions, and even some graduate programs. What's critical and why that's so important right now is a real emphasis on creating viable pathways between high school and postsecondary education. I know that a lot of the emphasis on Perkins over the past couple of years has been creating those pipelines and those pathways from high school to postsecondary. And I think what's really a tribute to the collaboration that we have with educators across the United States is that they recognized very early on that, especially in the IT industry, creating pathways--both academically and into careers--is really critical for the success of students.

ACTE: We read, and you briefly mentioned it, that it's not just schools that are academies, it's also local workforce development organizations, for instance, that could become an academy?

CM: We've got some very strong community-based organizations doing outreach to transitioning workers. I can think of Focus: HOPE out in Detroit. We have a very strong partnership at the federal level with Job Corps. And, again, I think their work in terms of really helping to educate and train nontraditional learners, kind of in that 18 to 24 framework, has been a very important partnership. And what's interesting about the Job Corps relationship is very often they're partnering with community colleges in their local area to train the workforce in high-demand, high-tech areas, but they are also creating, again, that articulation for college credit. We see this not only in the community-based organizations but very, very strongly in the partnerships between high schools and community colleges.

ACTE: Could you give us an example of pathways that an academy student could take?

CM: One of the key partnerships that we have as Cisco is the work that we do with the National Association of State Directors of Career and Tech Ed. We're very involved in the IT career cluster or the career cluster project. One of the things that we have really worked on is to ensure that our curriculum maps very closely to the knowledge and skill competencies that are core to the networking pathway within the IT career cluster.

So in many schools that I work with at the high school level, they may have the 10th, 11th and 12th-grade IT academy. And so there is a sequence of courses, we call it CCNA Discovery; but that is very much a project-based approach to learning foundational skills of networking within a business context