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National Information Security, Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC)

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Virtual Internships for Time-Pressed Students

NISGTC was a seven-member multi-state consortium led by Collin College to help prepare students for employment in the IT areas of programming, networking and convergence technology, cybersecurity, and geospatial technologies. With support from a TAACCCT grant, NISGTC worked with employers to create an innovative paid, virtual internship that enabled students to work on a concrete project with an IT employer via webinars, with a face-to-face presentation at the end. This paid, virtual internship was particularly helpful for students who were working and/or raising a family, for whom a traditional low-paid or unpaid internship would have been prohibitive.

The NISGTC program trained 6,201 participants for the IT sector and created four virtual internship/externship capstone courses (1). When Taylor Knoblock completed his virtual internship and then graduated in 2013, he was hired by a health care IT firm as a network engineer, with a salary $15,000 more than the $40,000 per year that he had been making previously (2).

“[These students] are smart, bright, hard workers and they’re employable.” (3)

—Tu Huynh, vice president of infrastructure technology services, Comerica Bank, and virtual internship mentor

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Find and use FREE Open Educational Resources available on SkillsCommons.

Additional Project Information

What is NISGTC: An intro to what NISGTC is all about

Additional Videos

An employer discusses NISGTC and the virtual internships

NISGTC students talk about their experiences in participating in the virtual internship/externship project

From Collin College student to AMX employee. Filmed at the NISGTC annual Consortium Meeting, April 2014

  1. “Outcomes. NISGTC Accomplishments and Deliverables.” The National Information Security & Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC), n.d., http://www.nisgtc.org/outcomes.html.
  2. Beyond the Metrics: The Broader Impact of the NISGTC DOL TAACCCT Grant (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, National Information Security, Geospatial Technologies Consortium [NISGTC], 2015), 15, http://nisgtc.org/documents/BroaderImpactBook.pdf.
  3. “NISGTC BILT: Students,” published June 26, 2013, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUzYHWuOaVc&feature=youtu.be.