There exist a wealth of extant educational resources and industry vendor certification paths which could potentially be of benefit to our students.  Most technology students seek to avail themselves of a variety of vendor certifications.  Such certifications attest to a set of specific technical skills and serve to attract potential employers.  Since the majority of our students will be pursuing third-party certifications, our goal is to offer them as much preparation as possible, ideally with materials garnered directly from the certifying vendors.  As such, we seek to partner with several vendors who offer widely sought after skill accreditations including:

    Cisco CCNA Academy

    vmWare IT Academy

    EMC Academy

    RedHat Academy

    Oracle Academy

    Amazon Educational

Since these certification tracks may be of benefit not only to our students, but to a wider audience of local professionals and job seekers, we will be working closely with CAPE and David Kohn to build these relationships.  In order to implement these programs, we hope to leverage our proposed Newburgh networking lab (see our "Newburgh Networking Lab" initiative) as a critical component in offering these vendor alliances.

Several of the partnerships mentioned in this initiative are tied to our Newburgh Networking lab request.

This is a rather ambitious set of partnership goals.  Implementation may depend upon vendor availability, current regional academy distributions, and vendor-imposed resource constraints.  Such factors may change our interest in, and the order in which we seek to build, such partnerships.