SUMMARY OF PROBLEM
The Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) for one of the country's largest counties administers a program which provides youth with resources to work towards self-sufficiency when they emancipate from custody of DCFS. The number of youth eligible for ES/ILP had grown to over 13,000 individuals. DCFS wanted to develop a Microsoft .NET based in-house solution to replace the outdated mainframe-based systems. This new system would allow sharing and tracking of ES/ILP data by integrating data, generating reports, automating schedules, assessing outcomes, tracking services, providing other agencies with information, allowing entry of data via the web, interfacing with three legacy systems, and allowing scalability to meet future needs of ES/ILP.

SUMMARY OF SOLUTION
With a staff of only 16 developers all trained to program legacy mainframe systems, DCFS chose QuickStart to help upgrade their skills. Using the QuickStart learning framework, a skills assessment was performed to find the programming abilities of all 16 developer team members. Based on the skill gaps of where the team could perform at today and where the team needed their skills to be, a series of custom courses based on Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) were created.

Beginning the learning plan at "Introduction to Programming" and ending with "Programming with ADO .NET" each custom course in the series was paired with a custom designed MegaLab. QuickStart's exclusive MegaLabs are developed by our expert trainers to provide a real world experience to the classes, offering the opportunity to apply what they've learned in class. By applying these skills in a real-world classroom simulation the result was a greater level of experience and confidence that could be applied immediately.

This training solution of Skills Assessments, Learning Plan, Custom Courseware, and MegaLabs allowed DCFS to improve their skills so they could develop their desired solution using in-house developers, thus saving costs on outsourcing or third-party solutions empowering DCFS developers to easily maintain and change their system based on their needs today and tomorrow.