{"id":39812,"date":"2025-11-14T19:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/39812\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T19:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:59:07","slug":"life-changing-experience-26-nyc-employees-graduate-from-citys-first-it-management-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/39812\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Life-changing experience’: 26 NYC employees graduate from city’s first IT Management Academy"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, more than two dozen New York City employees marked their completion of a \u201clife-changing experience,\u201d becoming the first to graduate from the city\u2019s Information Technology Management Academy, a new, in-house learning program for tech leaders.<\/p>\n

New York City\u2019s IT Management Academy was announced<\/a> in August, and over the last three months, the 26 participating city employees \u2014 which were all full-time city employees at a director or above level \u2014 met once per week, in person, for a series of workshops led by expert consultants, senior managers and IT executives from across various city agencies.\u00a0It was inspired by the Management Academy housed within the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which has served as the city\u2019s premier professional development program for managers for more than two decades.<\/p>\n

The IT Management Academy sessions included formal classroom learning, group discussions, cases studies, moderated panels and leadership engagement. The curriculum focused on three core areas: developing and using human resources, understanding the operational aspects of city systems and processes, and learning best practices from IT executives.<\/p>\n

Each participant was nominated by agency leaders. They were selected from more than 100 nominations, based on their leadership potential, impact to their current roles, commitment to public service, and communication and collaboration skills.\u00a0NYC\u2019s Office of Technology and Innovation covered the full program cost for the initial cohort to eliminate financial barriers to participation, and to demonstrate the city\u2019s commitment to investing in its digital future.<\/p>\n

Lisa Woods, the director of Apple support and operations for OTI, graduated from the program Friday. She said that in addition to the experience being \u201clife-changing,\u201d every aspect of the program was helpful. She compared the collaboration the course helped to foster with other city IT leaders to \u201clightning in a bottle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the combination of the people that were chosen to participate, the facilitators that presented, the [chief information officers] and [chief financial officers] who joined us for panels,\u201d Cook said. \u201cMy academy peers often talk about how we\u2019d be in a session, and I\u2019d be in the back and say, Hmm, that\u2019s interesting. Or, I\u2019d say, That really resonated with me. \u2026 I feel like the design of the curriculum was just chef\u2019s kiss. Very well done, very thoughtful. They touched on every subject that we as IT leaders need, and I\u2019m just very grateful to have been able to participate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clara Gomez, IT support director for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, another graduate of the new program, said she too felt the experience was transformational.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt allowed me to see that we, as managers in the City of New York, have very similar responsibilities and many different challenges, and having to collaborate with other groups and learning from other special coaches helped a lot in identifying problems that we face every day, and figuring out how to collaborate with other people,\u201d Gomez said. \u201cI also learned a lot about coaching my own staff and thinking more strategically about decisions that we sometimes have to make on behalf of the city and our systems. There was a lot of transformation for me overall, as a leader and as an employee for the City of New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Keely<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWritten by Keely Quinlan
\n\t\t\tKeely Quinlan reports on privacy and digital government for StateScoop. She was an investigative news reporter with Clarksville Now in Tennessee, where she resides, and her coverage included local crimes, courts, public education and public health. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, Stereogum and other outlets. She earned her bachelor\u2019s in journalism and master\u2019s in social and cultural analysis from New York University.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday, more than two dozen New York City employees marked their completion of a \u201clife-changing experience,\u201d becoming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[23176,9,24,8365,56,63,65,23177,64,5065],"class_list":["post-39812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-it-management","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-office-of-technology-and-innovation","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-it-management-academy","tag-nyc-news","tag-state-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}