i.c. stars and the proverbial leg-up

The job market has taken a toll on new graduates, with greater numbers either staying in school or coming back home for the time being, and the information technology field is no exception.

i.c. stars founder Sandee Kastrul says economics and competition have increased the need for a "longer runway" for the program's inner-city technology graduates after their four months of concentrated business, leadership and technology training.

Among other business leaders, Bob Kress at Accenture has been at the end of that runway with a good fit for the skills being developed at i.c. stars, hiring almost a dozen graduates over the past few years.

The Chicago Tribune has done a nice write-up of what i.c. stars is doing in their article this past weekend.

Opportunity Knocks

Two of my friends at ic stars, Bea Elizalde and Sandee Kastrul, were featured in this Sun-Times story over the weekend. What a great program with a true pay-it-forward mentality.

iOpener Event in Chicago

Today's i-Opener event packed the house at the Chicago Cultural Center and was highlighted with group discussions around the importance of creativity and innovation to the future of technology in Chicago. Edwin Lange, EVP at SAP, made some revelations about how a company like SAP harnesses innovation. Get a picture of the impact i.c. stars is having on changing young people's lives with technology here.

Now i c stars

Today's big event in Chicago was the i.c. stars Capitalize on Illinois event. Wow - what an assembly of CIO and other executives all in one room. Founder Sandee Kastrul commands a fantastic energy level and a list of participants from companies like Siemens, Allstate, IBM, Hewitt, Motorola and a roomful of others. If you're in business in Chicago and you don't know about this yet, you need to get on board. i.c. stars is a remarkable program in Chicago that transforms aspiring young talent into IT professionals over 1000 hours of concentrated training, many times doubling and even tripling their income. See their recruiting page here and their corporate page here.

Kellogg MBA Dave Peak made a special presentation on his latest endeavor, LiquidTalk, which is a solution designed to increase productivity among mobile workers by pushing content out to their phones and PDA's while they're on the road. Particularly for companies with large sales teams, this has real potential for adding value. Here's an article about their launch with Blackberry earlier this year.

iOpener

This past week finished off on Friday with the "iOpener" event, one of the city's biggest annual technology executive events, hosted by ic stars at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown. Among the topics at the event was the need for creativity in technology, especially its value in the new high-tech workforce.

Peter Drucker said there are only two real functions of a business; marketing and innovation. Innovation is the point where creativity stops being a clever idea and starts showing a return on investment. But creativity is where the initial value lies in a world where access to technology resources is becoming increasingly ubiquitous.

Michael Krauss, President of Market Strategy Group and member of the Mayor's Council of Technology Advisors, moderated a collaborative discussion through the audience at Friday's event to create message points on why 18-25 year olds should choose IT as a career. The results of the discussion will be published in an upcoming paper entitled, "Move the Future," in response to the continuing decline in enrollments for technology-related education and the increasing difficulty in finding people for IT positions.

The tools to make the next facebook or a photobucket or a digg are out there for anyone with a laptop, and the value of creativity to see them in a new way is the new trump card. As an executive at Apple said a couple years ago (pre-iPod), "We want to be the ones who come up with new ideas -- not the ones who snap the pieces together..."

i.c. stars Hits An Even Dozen in 2007

What better way to start off the new year than by finishing a thousand hours of training and getting off to a fresh start in a technology career? Last week the twelfth group of interns in the i.c. stars program were all smiling bigger than Robbie Gould as they spoke passionately about the world of opportunity opened up to them through their four-month experience in learning about business, leadership and technology. What a great program -- and with perfect timing a new $25,000 scholarship fund has just been announced in partnership with Geneca and DePaul University. See this week's Yahoo! story here.