Chances are you have a number of openings in your IS department. You’re not alone. There are an estimated 425,000 unfilled IT worker positions nationwide. And pretty much like every other CIO, you’ve complained that there just aren’t enough qualified candidates for the jobs.

CIOs love to point the finger at academics and claim they’re not producing the kind of graduate who can become a seamlessly productive employee from day one. Educators don’t see it that way.

"Corporations have been wanting universities to solve their hot problems, with Java [experience] and MCSE [certifications]," says Jack Suess, CIO of the University of Maryland in Baltimore county. "That was never our mission?to be solving these kinds of very specific problems in a particular time frame."

It seems to be a standoff. Corporations want grads to be conversant with everything from the shiniest new programming language to the creakiest minicomputer in the vault. Schools continue to focus on balanced curricula. Yet schools and CIOs can get along. In some cases, companies are going into the classroom and taking over curricula. In other cases, teachers are taking sabbaticals in the real world so that when they return to the classroom they have more up-to-date skills. And there’s a new educational movement afoot to marry what academics want to teach with the skills that CIOs want in new hires. But it takes work both inside and out of the ivory tower.

Reaching into the Classroom

Reconciling industry’s need-it-now goals with university ideals isn’t necessarily impossible. In fact, it can work beautifully when the two sides team up. One case in point is UPS. In the beginning of 2000, UPS’s Atlanta-area operations desperately sought a near-term infusion of Web layout and development talent. Fortunately, CIO Ken Lacy and Dudley Land, former vice president of customer automation and UPS operations, found a helpful partner in Georgia State University. Ephraim McLean, professor of information systems, and David McDonald, academic program director in the computer information systems department, were eager to help UPS close its skills gap quickly.

The result of their efforts was a 21-week, dual-certificate prototype that ran from May through October. Half of the students?those destined for content creation?had to attend only the first 11 weeks for an HTML development certificate. The second group completed the full course for a grounding in both design and programming. There was no shortage of student interest: UPS targeted career-changers, who accounted for the 1,600 applicants for 17 open spots.