CIIT College of Arts and Technology, a digital technical education and multimedia arts school in the country, has launched two new next-level courses for the coming school year that are tailor-made for the next generation of business innovators and technology entrepreneurs.
“This audience is wired to be creators themselves, so our programs will resonate well with them because the knowledge and skills they will acquire will make their ideas come to life efficiently,” Sherwin O, CIIT president said, in an open-house media briefing at its seven-story Interweave Tower campus in Brgy. Kamuning on Thursday, March 16.
O said, however, that CIIT’s new offerings — Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship and Senior High School-Accounting, Business, and Management (ABM) Strand — will more than enrich the knowledge and skills of those “between the ages of 16-34 and those who consider themselves early adopters.”
He said the courses now complete the next-level educational ecosystem of the technology-driven school as envisioned by CIIT founder and board chairman Elson Niel S. Dagondon, when he opened the school in 2008.
O said CIIT, guided by its core value of integrity, stayed with its two competencies that produce industry-ready graduates instead of introducing “profitable college degrees.”
“CIIT now has an ecosystem of innovators and creators who can make the ideas of its students a reality, much like how Silicon Valley fosters great talents,” he said.
O said the pandemic — when new business owners seized the opportunities as almost everything moved online — inspired CIIT “to go full circle and give the students a chance to turn their business ideas into reality.”
“CIIT has always been into arts and tech, but its unique entrepreneurship and ABM programs that will revolutionize the way a business is run using different technologies in its daily operations, like CIIT itself, now tie things together,” he said.
O said, “unlike most entrepreneurship and business management programs, CIIT goes beyond the usual expectation of discussing classroom concepts and creating traditional business models.”
“CIIT transforms the experience by also adding digital platforms and business-level tools to allow our students to turn their ideas into real tech startups,” he said.
Asked if institutions like CIIT are agile enough to close the gap between knowledge and skills development and the industry needs, O said “it has always been part of the core of CIIT to innovate and close that gap, which was the main reason why CIIT was established.”
When Dagondon put up Anino Games, the first and largest game development studio in the country, in the early 2000s, he realized that a big gap existed between the industry demand and the higher education programs.
“Innovation is part of our DNA as it is one of our core values in which we seek to continuously improve the systems, processes, and our way of doing things,” O said.
CIIT, he said, leverages automation in almost every clerical task in its school administration system, but no employee has ever been replaced.
“Instead, they become increasingly efficient, productive, accurate, and agile as they focus on value-driven tasks and higher levels of challenges that further push CIIT towards faster innovation,” he said.
This is why, he said, the new courses are customized based on industry needs and standards that are “validated and recognized by seasoned professionals and our more than 100 company partners.”
O said the courses will “equip our organizations as well as Filipinos with knowledge and skills that will allow them to be at par with international organizations.
According to O, CIIT students “experience their studies either through modular means or their computers, taking away such advantages as having a sprawling campus.”
This industry-based approach to education and curriculum design, he said, enables CIIT to not only address the gap between the industry and education “but also to live up to its goal of producing next-level graduates.”
O explained the CIIT advantage: “We not only teach our students theories or concepts like marketing, operations, human resource, finance or accounting, but we also teach them how to optimize business tasks through various applications used by organizations worldwide. This enables them to execute their ideas immediately.”
He cited that, in marketing for example, CIIT goes beyond the ordinary curriculum by teaching its students how to actually create and launch Facebook advertising campaigns and analyze the reports. O said that innovation is part of almost all the subjects in CIIT’s ABM strand.
The college tuition fee at CIIT ranges between P119,000 to P132,000 a year, depending on the specific program, and this already includes the laboratory and miscellaneous fees.
CIIT also offers scholarships and flexible tuition arrangements for the economically challenged but promising students.
Incoming or new students who graduated with honors from Senior High School can avail of its Interweave Scholarship program, while the Top 50 successful applicants of the CIIT College Admissions Test are offered the Future CIITzen Scholarship Grant.
Students in good standing but are experiencing financial challenges can avail of the CIIT Financial Aid. CIIT students are “free to voice their opinions and are heard by the school,” according to O.
