Nicholls State University Teams with IBM to Prepare Students for Jobs of the Future

Last week Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, welcomed incoming and returning students. As part of the welcome events, dozens of students, administrators, local business leaders and IBM representatives attended a joint Nicholls and IBM event to discuss the new IBM-developed IT Service Management curriculum available to computer science majors and MBA students beginning this fall. The new curriculum has helped increase enrollment in the IS program by nearly 70 percent over last year.

Nicholls is a 210-acre campus approximately 50 miles southwest of New Orleans and 60 miles southeast of Baton Rouge. Nicholls is the sole provider of higher education in the region, and heavily participates in the development of the region, forging major partnerships with businesses, local school systems, community agencies, and other educational institutions. IBM worked closely with Nicholls to redefine its curriculum for the Bachelor of Science in Information Systems program with a specialization in IT Service Management.

IBM is working with more than 150 schools like Nicholls in more than 40 countries to bridge the gap between academic output and industry needs. By introducing this new curriculum, students will be prepared to work on important projects that are being funded by government stimulus plans around the world.

Fortune Brainstorm: Tech

This week, two IBMers are speaking at Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, an event focused "on how technology companies, content creators and other institutions can thrive in the recession, and help lead the way to a new era of global prosperity."

The three day agenda is robust with sessions such as "Networking a Dumb Planet" and "Future Tech: Is the Risk Worth the Reward." The agenda concludes with Ashton Kutcher (actor/producer and Katalyst Co-founder) chatting it up with Fortune's Andy Serwer about the ways the entertainment industry can better use technology to advance business and social goals.

The theme of Fortune's event "Global crisis; global opportunity" dove tails nicely to what IBM has been evangelizing through its Smarter Planet initiative. IBM believes the opportunity and time for change is now. The technology -- cloud, stream computing, sensors -- is available and ready. People are ready for change. As a society, many of our current ways of doing things are inefficient and expensive, and eventually will not work.

If you find yourself in Pasadena this week, check out Fortune Brainstorm: Tech and say hi to Bill Pulleyblank and Alan Ganek from IBM who will be discussing how to build a smarter planet.