History
In the mid-1990's, TEC Services developed its first educational workforce development solution, the TeraU program. TeraU was originally a collaboration of secondary educators, administrators, businesses, and TEC Services education specialists. TeraU utilized extensive student interest in computers, programming, and related technology and encouraged the natural union of school facilities and student interest. TeraU was designed to quickly begin filling the ever-widening demand for skilled, technical workers with employable high school graduates. This cooperative education program has grown into an education-to-careers program that reaches grade school students. The current program provides project-based career knowledge, employability skills, and the technical or programming expertise for high school students to fulfill and expand their information technology career goals.
The TeraU program was developed to address the increasing IT industry demand for workers and to close the widening digital divide, by taking advantage of student interest in technology and coupling it with occupational participation, cogent career development planning, and technical instruction to assist in the recognition of personal strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. TeraU students participate in technical projects that provide real experiences that affirm and enhance technical skills, troubleshooting skills, teamwork skills, employability skills, and communication skills. To assure that TeraU students possess the appropriate balance of technical skills, customer service skills and industry lifelong learning skills, TeraU content has long focused on three areas:
- Technical certification
- Entry level employability
- Career readiness
TeraU core technical skills include the ability to build, maintain, upgrade, and repair computers; to use the Internet for technical support; to identify personal contributions to corporate business plans and objectives; to implement development life cycle principles, and to perform network or application troubleshooting. Student interest in technology is focused on business projects that require communication skills and either networking or application development expertise.
TeraU provides opportunities to learn a special kind of thinking, thinking on your feet. This is the fundamental ability to learn new concepts and skills, to assess unknown situations, and to contend with the unanticipated. This thinking is what the students of today must master to become the knowledge workers of tomorrow.