Like many of you, I’ve been reflecting during the holidays upon the year that passed, taking stock of what I’m grateful for and re-watching some classic holiday movies. In one, the main character goes through trying circumstances, almost dies, and is reminded that life is all about relationships and family. Nope, not It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m talking about another great holiday film; Die Hard.
Yep, Die Hard. Besides being the greatest action movie ever made, it’s also set at Christmas time and once you get past the explosions and gunfire, it’s a holiday movie at its core.
I get it, you’re skeptical, but bear with me. There are lots of great life lessons in Die Hard. For one; always keep your shoes on because you never know when you’ll be walking on glass. Second, relationships matter. Bruce Willis’ character, John McLane, is a man with some broken relationships that need fixing. He hasn’t adjusted to his wife’s career success. He doesn’t trust very easily. He thinks every law enforcement official on the scene, except Sgt. Powell, is incompetent.
It’s an action-movie twist on the classic Dickens tale of Scrooge, but rather than a journey with three Christmas ghosts, McLane learns the value of relationships by being shot at and blown up by a bunch of German bank robbers. It’s the relationship with Sgt. Powell that gets McLane through many tough situations, and during his harrowing journey, he reaffirms the importance of friendship and family…and shoes.
When I came on board with the Creating IT Futures Foundation three years ago, we were running a program that used a distance education model. Though we were able to push the online training to a large number of people, we didn’t see a success rate as high as we would have liked. Most of those who trained did not obtain IT jobs or careers.
Thankfully, unlike John McLane, we didn’t need to destroy Nakatomi Plaza to figure out what was wrong: the missing ingredient was relationships. We didn’t know these students. We didn’t know the employers that might be interested in hiring them. Everyone was spread around the U.S. and the students didn’t even know one another.
In 2012, we changed our program to one built around creating relationships even though it meant sacrificing breadth in favor of depth. IT-Ready, designed for unemployed adults, needed not only to provide students with technical skills; it also needed to help them build relationships in an entirely new industry.
For eight weeks, seven hours a day, IT-Ready students meet in a classroom to learn from our instructors. They work collaboratively with their fellow students. They meet CIOs and IT managers who share ways to be successful. They take part in mock interviews and learn how to develop an elevator pitch that communicates their qualifications to a would-be employer.
By the time an IT-Ready student graduates and certifies in CompTIA A+, we know them very well; so well that we are able to recommend that person to an employer without reservation. Our students have built a network of relationships with each other, with our staff and with our employer volunteers.
This past summer we held a couple of alumni networking events and the turnout was terrific. Not only did the graduates show up but so did their supervisors at their new jobs. Our employer partners recognize the value of a relationship with IT-Ready and most of our employers have hired multiple students over the life of the program. We’ve become a valuable talent pipeline for employers in our regions.
This may sound pretty simple for business people who know how important relationships are to success, but in the quest to get people back to work, too many workforce and training programs have forgotten just what it takes to be employable. Technical skills are just one part of the equation.
While we may have started out serving fewer people than with our online training program, IT-Ready is getting more people into jobs and we’re on track to grow to six cities by the end of 2014, serving almost 700 adults annually.
In the immortal words of John McLane, “Yippee-ki-yay.”
Charles Eaton is CEO and executive director of the Creating IT Futures Foundation.
