MORRISVILLE, N.C. (WNCN) — Students at Wake Tech’s RTP campus are learning what it takes to make it in the field of information technology.

Interest in that field continues to grow, and that’s why the school is expanding its program to offer degree-plus programs.

“These are really courses for people who have experience and degrees to upscale into new or different job areas,” said Keith Babuszczak, the provost of IT programs at Wake Tech.

The school is partnering with two major companies: Momentum, a tech-training firm based in the Triangle, and Red Hat.

According to Wake Tech, the new degree plus programs the school offers include:

Collaborative Software Engineering Using Agile Methods and Git by Momentum at WakeTech starts March 6 and teaches hands-on, interactive software building as a team while developing a front-end web application. Coursework will cover Git version control, Agile Manifesto, Kanban, Continuous improvement, Scoping and Slicing, and Scrum.

Intro to Back End Software Engineering by Momentum at WakeTech provides back-end web development skills for those familiar with the fundamentals of JavaScript and Git version control. Students will work mostly within Node.js but will also discuss comparisons to Ruby on Rails.Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) also starts in March. This course is for individuals with a basic understanding of Linux who want to learn how to administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Employers are asking for additional skills and so we wanted to offer courses that meet their needs and people are interested in learning more so we kind of used both of those to create those opportunities, stretch our offerings a bit and offer higher level courses than we usually offer for people to meet those new job needs,” said Babuszczak.  

Brooks Raiford, the president and CEO of the North Carolina Tech Association, says that despite layoffs happening at some big tech companies, IT jobs remain in demand.

“Even though there’s been a downward tick in recent months, one month to the next, each month compared to the same month last year is up,” said Raiford. 

He also says IT jobs in North Carolina have increased over the past four years. Some IT jobs still in demand are cybersecurity and software development. 

You can find more information about Wake Tech’s degree plus programs here.