Has you institution thought about.. Microsoft IT Academy?

So how much does it cost IT Academy Membership (pa)

Circa £850 ERP if added to you software agreement with your reseller

£1,100 if bought direct through https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/itacademy/apply-now.aspx at the Advanced level

FREE Benefits through IT Academy

300+ Microsoft Elearning Courses This is a ‘living’ library, so new courses are added automatically when available

1 x Microsoft Certified Trainer Membership (MCT), 25% on additional membership Normal cost is £225 pa

Lesson Plans inc. Office, Windows, Windows Server and Expression Web 4 which are customizable

5 x Microsoft Press eReference subscriptions

Plus more including simple elearning LMS - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/itacademy/program-benefits/program-benefits-overview.aspx

Supporting Students IT Employability Through Professional Certification

Student certifications for employability

Is your institution already an IT Academy?

Check here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/itacademy/ita-locator.aspx

Certification FEE (discounted) through IT Academy

Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) exam vouchers.  £48 per voucher vs £99

Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC), circa £48 for a 5 day course (+50% discount)

Access to site licenses for MTA and MOS exams

The additional costs after the initial membership fee would be for printed content and certification, if you wanted to adopt and embed them in to your courses.

Below, I have listed some prices for both the MCP and MTA (site licence) exams at various volumes

MCP could be embedded in to the courses and  funded through students themselves or subsidised through the course fees

The IET do recognise the MCP certification towards proving the technical skills for IET membership, see here

MTA – looking at the courses you offer and number of students, I would imagine that the 500 pack could be relatively low risk and you could take advantage of the phone camps and interest in gaming to allow students to certify on these technologies now?

You can see the objective specifications for the MTA exams here to understand how they could support your programming/mobile and gaming courses here

MTA exams come with free Student Study Guides and Exam Review Kits to support you

Staff Development & CPD

I see two other areas where the membership and benefits can be leveraged for additional ROI and benefit for the University

IT Department – the benefits are open to them too.  They can train and certify on the latest technology and that will support them in deployment of new desktop/server technology on campus.

University Staff – the MOS training and certification can be used to offer to staff to improve their own ICT skills and productivity and support desktop migrations to the latest Office products

www.nhsmost.co.uk is an excellent example of how the MOS exam is supporting end user skilling and efficiency

Free Exams

Each IT Academy (site) has 20 x MTA and 10 x MOS exam vouchers per year to use for staff development

This could be a good way for you to get a closer look at the exams themselves and to make assessments for adoption

You would get access to these (and the ability to do onsite) testing through our partner, Prodigy Learning – would you like me to make an introduction?

MTA Pathways

You can see the full list of MTA exams and the objective domains here

We provide free Student Study Guides and Exam Review Kits for these Link is here

There is additional printed curriculum (MOAC) through Wiley publishers

Content, Certification & Currency

We like to think that we have certifications and a portfolio of content (courseware, elearning etc) available for all major releases of Microsoft products including Cloud services such as Azure

We also have a strategy to release courseware and exams for key technologies when they are in beta e.g. current System Center 2012 and forthcoming SQL vNext etc

Moving forward, the plan is to release full exams and content within 1 month of full product release including dedicated MTA Developer certification and a HTML 5 MTA which due for release later this month

Support for IT Academies & Getting Started

We have academic support partners that can do some of the handholding for you

Prodigy Learning – they can help set up the MTA/MOS exams on site with testing facilities at no additional cost

IT Skills Management Company – they specialize in supporting IT Academies, helping them understand how to make the most of the benefit.

Prometric – our partner for MCP, like Prodigy they will support and set up the test center on site at no extra charge. You can become a public test site for additional revenue

We hope this information helps get more professional development for students and staff and it seems a shame that a number of Universities aren’t taking use of the IT Academy to address employability and staff development