Building a Foundation for Tomorrow: Skill Standards for Information Technology, is a cooperative effort of the NorthWest Center for Emerging Technologies, the Regional Advanced Technology Education Consortium, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, the Washington Software and Digital Media Alliance (WSDMA), and the Society for Information Management (SIM).

The goal of this Advanced Technology Education project was to identify voluntary skill standards that reflect industry expectations in information technology career clusters and which can be used to:

• Improve the education of the information technology workforce.
• Increase the cooperation between education and business.
• Improve academic mobility by developing articulated curriculum that continues from high school through the community and technical colleges and on to four-year institutions.
• Establish criteria and standards for model technology degrees.

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Major industry support was provided by The Boeing Company, Microsoft, PACCAR, and other leading technology companies in the Pacific Northwest.

SmartSkills 2003
An online version of IT Skills Standards, SmartSkills 2003, is available for an annual subscription of $75. Register for the SmartSkills 2003 web site. Already a subscriber? Login to the SmartSkills 2003 web site.

What Are Skill Standards?
Voluntary skill standards establish the agreed-upon, industry-identified knowledge, skills, and abilities required to succeed in the workplace. Skill standards provide benchmarks of skill and performance attainment that are behavioral and measurable. Skill standards answer two critical questions:

• What do workers need to know and be able to do to succeed in today's workplace?
• How do we know when workers are performing well?

• Industry-identified skill standards will serve as a vehicle for companies to communicate their performance expectations for workers. Skill standards will provide a common framework for communication of workplace expectations between business, education, workers, students, and government.
• Voluntary skill standards will facilitate the reform of education to match the curriculum to workplace requirements. Competency-based standards will assure the employability of students who have completed programs based on those standards. National recognition of skill standards in career fields will provide a common basis for certifying achievement against those standards, thereby allowing for the portability of skills across companies and careers.
• Skill standards will close the qualification gap by linking industry expectations for knowledge, skills, and abilities to the education provided to students. Skill standards will provide workplace expectations, so students know what they need to be able to do to meet those expectations, workers understand what is expected to perform and advance in their field, and educators can discern the competencies on which the curriculum is developed.