Berkshire Applied Technology Council, Inc.
U.S. Department of Labor – Employment and Training Administration
Training for the New Technologies Program
Information Technology Component
Berkshire Community College (BCC) and Prospect Foundation have provided training for the Information Technology Component of the Department of Labor Grant.
BCC has offered an array of IT training at both the BCC Downtown site and at Lee Central School. Workshops in all levels of Access, Excel, Project, PowerPoint, and Word were conducted during the entire 2002 fall semester. The Spring 2003 slate of classes consisted of MS Office courses such as Access, Excel, Project, PowerPoint and Word and also covered FrontPage, Outlook, Windows, and Internet/HTML.
A special program has been developed by Berkshire Community College based upon feedback from many companies that participated in the Berkshire Applied Technology Council/DOL Microsoft training at the BCC Downtown location. Starting with the Fall 2003 semester, there will be a two semester Business Software Systems credit-bearing program that will lead to Microsoft Certification as a Microsoft Office Specialist. Diane Wilson, who was the instructor for the BATC downtown training, will also be the instructor for this new certificate/certification program. These courses will be held at the BCC Main Campus located at 1350 West Street, Pittsfield, MA. For more information contact Denise Johns at (413) 499-4660, x386 or email at djohns@berkshirecc.edu
Prospect Foundation in North Adams, MA has offered Excel, Photoshop and Quark courses at the C4 Labs at Mass MoCA and the Life Long Learning Lab at MCLA. For Spring 2003, Prospect Foundation offered training in Quark, Access, Outlook, Systems Administration and PowerPoint. They also will offer XML (Extensible Markup Language) training. They will continue to offer Access I & II, PowerPoint I & II, Excel I & II into the Fall of 2003. To date, the Department of Labor grant has served approximately 500 incumbent workers from approximately 50 different Berkshire County businesses. The grant will run until December 31, 2003.