Karl McCollester has worked in the IT industry for 16 years. He has been a successful CIO and business executive, leading multi-million dollar product initiatives and overseeing company expansions into new territories. Those experiences provided him with first-hand knowledge of the IT skills gap and the vital role IT-oLogy can play for its partners. Most recently, Karl has led an entrepreneurial team at an Internet startup, Voterheads.com. Karl manages corporate and business partnerships with IT-oLogy.
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When a company’s primary mission is, in short, to get more people into IT jobs, sometimes you do something and think “Why didn’t we do that sooner?” I think that pretty much sums up the Career Fair IT-oLogy held with Tech After 5 and TM Floyd on December 5th.
More than 300 IT job seekers attended the event to find out about jobs from the 30 companies present. Thanks to Tech After Five, the opportunity went well into the evening, giving both recruiters and job seekers an informal way to make new connections.
IT-oLogy will send out surveys to all attendees and recruiters shortly to make sure the event was valuable to everyone and worth repeating. Having said that, the initial comments have been encouraging. One participant raved about the event. “Thanks for a wonderful career fair you hosted yesterday. I thought it was the best one I have ever attended.” One of our employers also followed up after the event: “My team indicated it was very informative and they feel they walked away with a lot of good contacts for future employment opportunities.”
Like anything at IT-oLogy, none of this could have happened without our dedicated staff or our volunteers! The project team from USC’s IIT program did a great job helping us with outreach to the local universities as well as helping us recruit volunteers from the student body. We hope they put our IT-oLogy green t-shirts to good use, besides when they’re on traffic safety patrol.
We are excited to have had a chance to launch this idea. We will work hard over the next few weeks to collect feedback and document the experience so it can be leveraged by our other branches in the future. If you have an idea for an event or want to get involved if we plan to hold another Career Fair, please reach out to us via out website: http://www.IT-oLogy.org.
