Apple Certs Help Ignite Careers

  By Jonathan Blake Huer —

This semester, Ball State is offering 15 certification classes on campus between the Apple Pro Training and Adobe Certified Associate courses. Currently, 11 of these courses are full with wait lists, and the remaining four are nearly full. Additionally, Ball State recently expanded its professional offerings to include the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server courses, allowing the university to serve the many hybrid media professionals who do both media content creation and system support. The university also plans to add iLife and iWork courses soon, with the eventual goal of offering all Apple training classes on campus and at the Indianapolis center.

With all this expertise, the Digital Corps has worked on numerous projects on campus, including typesetting publications, multimedia and Web-based assignments, documentaries and educational videos and even a custom billboard system based on Apple’s Quartz Composer. The Digital Corps also has created a Ball State Chirper iPhone app, available for free on the iTunes app store.

Perhaps most important, Apple certifications can help individuals land the jobs of their dreams. Of the Digital Corp’s five graduates, all are gainfully employed: One works at MTV Networks in New York City; another is a video editor for the Timberwolves, Minnesota’s NBA team; and a third serves as an assistant trailer editor for Winston Associates, a Colorado-based planning firm specializing in 3-D visualizations. The other two work for the Digital Corps. 

Jonathan Blake Huer is director of the Digital Corps and emerging technology and media development at Ball State University. He also is also an Apple Master Trainer in Final Cut Studio 2. He can be reached at editor@certmag.com.