The Datacenter Academy has five pillars:
- Curriculum Advising
- Financial Scholarship
- Datacenter Equipment Donation
- Externships (Work Experience)
- Career Mentorship
Pillar 1: Curriculum Advising
The Datacenter Academy recognizes the CompTIA A+, Server+, Network+ and Security+ as the baseline certifications for IT skills development. Advanced courses like CCNA, MCP and MCSE, where available, are also in line with our program with a pre-req of completing at least two of the CompTIA certs. An exposure to “soft skills” as part of the program is recommended including effective communication skills, writing competency, keyboarding proficiency, Office software experience and working as a team in a diverse environment.
Pillar 2: Scholarship
The Workforce Development team provides funding, to assist students on the course, where viable, to support advancement in core DC curricula.
Pillar 3: Equipment Donation
As part of the Datacenter Academy implementation, Microsoft will donate datacenter equipment to facilitate education through hands-on experience. The typical Datacenter Academy lab contains three (3) rack cabinets with a mix of servers, storage devices and networking equipment. Since the donated equipment comes directly from Microsoft datacenters, students will receive real-life exposure to hyper cloud hardware.
The DCA lab in Collinstown Park Community Collrge is a fully functional, 3-rack mini-scale datacenter.
Pillar 4: Externships
As part of the Microsoft Datacenter Academy, Microsoft provide an opportunity for Academy graduates to interview for work experiences (i.e., externships) within a Microsoft datacenter. Externships provide hands-on training along with real world application in an actual datacenter. These 12-week externships will expose students to an array of experiences from logistics to inventory management to hardware maintenance. Datacenter Academy Scholars may apply for externships and must meet the minimum externship requirements - e.g. completing current CompTIA course work and passing a minimum of one (1) CompTIA certification test.
Pillar 5: Mentorships
When possible, Microsoft will provide custom tours of the datacenter, in class lectures by DC staff, hands on labs and Q&A panels subject to the availability of the datacenter personnel. In addition, Microsoft staff will work with students to hone and polish soft skills such as resume building, interview preparation, building an impactful LinkedIn profile and establishing a Microsoft Careers account and alerts for open job notifications.