NOVA is launching a certificate program for fiber optic technicians

Thanks to a new investment from AWS, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is expanding its programming to support the area’s data centers.

AWS contributed $300,000 to the NOVA Educational Foundation’s Information and Engineering Technologies (IET) Fund, making up the latter entity’s largest private investment to date. With the six-figure sum, the school will create a new fiber optic technician career study certificate program. At the same time, the school is also making its data center operations program available at its Woodbridge campus (courses were already available at its Loudoun and Manassas campuses).

Chad Knights, VP of information and engineering technologies and college computing at NOVA, said that the fund was established to support students and help programs in the field. NOVA uses the money to identify ways to expand capacity and courses across the area, as well as support students through internships or offsetting costs of materials.

Initially, Knights said NOVA wanted to break into the data center game after hearing from many partners that there was a need for workers. The college had worked with AWS before to host fiber-optic fusion splicing courses (the pair plan to host one on the AWS campus next month, as well). This contribution, he told Technical.ly, allows the school to grow its programming to the larger data center ecosystem in Northern Virginia.

“We consistently kept hearing back from them that this was a gap in their overall workforce — of identifying individuals that were able to work both in infrastructure as well as on the technology and the fiber connected to these data centers,” Knights said.

Knights added that he hopes the new certificate program can be an opportunity for students to learn that skill set and either apply it to their current job or explore new opportunities in the data center sphere. Over the next year, he hopes to see about 100 students take part in the fiber certificate programming — a blend of both existing students and those who come to college specifically for the certificate.

“That funding is actually going to help us establish a new pathway that currently doesn’t exist yet, which is really focused on cabling and fiber optics,” Knights said.

Be it connecting students to internships for future jobs or just expanding their overall skill set, Knights said he’d love to link more of the programming within the IT sector at NOVA.

“[The cyber program] includes a heavy investment in networking technology, which then ties directly into this fiber optics and cabling,” Knights said. “And if I can offer some of those students an opportunity to see how they fit in now with the data center program, it just opens up more doors for those students once they can complete their journey at NOVA.”