Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

I completed two training programs in December.  One program I wrote about in this post was the Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals from Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research International.  Good course run by Dr Scott Bernard who walked the group of students through his EA3 Cube Methodology from his book.  This was an online course with students from around the world.  I especially enjoyed the conference calls and the weekly discussion topics as forums to interact with my fellow students.  Here is the link to the work we did as students populating the EA3 Repository for a fictitious aerospace company.  I plan on registering for the Advanced Enterprise Architecture course which runs from Jan to Mar 2009.  Once I complete that course, Carnegie Mellon will issue me a Certified Enterprise Architect designation.

The second was a series of courses from the Sauder School of Business, Executive Education program at the University of British Columbia resulting in a Certificate in Management Excellence. These courses addressed a serious gap in my resume in the realm of management skills.  The courses were face to face and required high interaction with the instructor and the other students.  I now have a set of skills and reference materials that will serve me well in the future.  Here is the list of courses I took:

• Coaching and Mentoring - 2 days
• Leading High Performance Teams - 2 days
• Strategies, Skills and Tactics of Negotiations - 3 days
• Navigating Organizational Behaviour - 2 days
• Fundamentals of Finance and Accounting for Non Financial Managers - 2 days
• Essential Management Skills - 5 days

I am very fortunate to work for a learning institution and received funding to take these programs/courses from my employer.  I hope you have equally enlightened employers who put a priority on enabling their staff with skills to be successful.  Thank you BCIT!