Robyn Mussler on Bay News 9 in May 2019, shortly after founding Connect-IT 360, on giving students the business and technology skills to compete and to run something of their own.
She describes how the program started. Four years earlier she had been asked to judge a competition run by the Pinellas Education Foundation, and what she saw there did not reflect how the industry actually works. Having taken on a lot of graduates herself, she knew which skills were missing, and offered to put something better together. The first year was a success.
What she built was a seven-month competition in Pinellas County: students work in teams of three to five, identify a real problem and the customer who has it, and develop a software product to solve it. The emphasis is on the problem first and the product second.
