After our second term in Burkina Faso, we returned to the US for furlough.  A family situation arose which first delayed our return, then prevented it altogether.  Once it was clear that God was closing the door back to Africa (via the family situation), I needed to change ministry directions.

I thought that I might look for some kind of role in engineering or software design, but the greatest need presented to me was that of recruiting the next wave of urgently-needed missionary IT professionals.  While I had no formal background for this (and it's a good thing there was no such requirement!), I had a great amount of zeal for augmenting Wycliffe's IT workforce.  I had just come from a field situation where the IT need was always greater than anything available to meet it.

I started my new role in IT Recruiting in August 2002.  There were 192 urgent needs for IT staff around the Wycliffe world.  I can count about 75 people (out of the hundreds of people I met) who joined Wycliffe as full-time IT professionals with my direct assistance.  When I left that role 4-1/2 years later in March 2007 (see our newsletters for full details), Wycliffe needed 260 IT workers world-wide.  The growth in the need completely outstripped (and still does) the resources coming to join us.  "...but the laborers are few..."

My major accomplishments:

• Recruited 75 people who ultimately became full-time workers
• Evaluated 100+ Wycliffe IT workers for assignment or re-assignment
• Counseled hundreds about IT service opportunities
• Created software tools to support the recruiting and site-visit processes
• Conceived and built the "IT World of Wycliffe" recruiting website (which is accessible by invitation only)
• Conceived and built a web-based Professional Skills Inventory database system, still in use today to gather recruits' skill and resume information.
• Helped conceive and implement the Check-IT-Out recruiting event.

The photos below show some of these activities.

My first days on the job in JAARS IT Mobilization. I was on the phone almost half my time, with many calls in the evenings and weekends when people were available to talk. The average call lasted 90-120 minutes. The experience led me to conceive and create...

...the IT World of Wycliffe website. It provided the basic orientation to potential Wycliffe IT workers that they needed, without having to wait for business hours or listen to me bloviate. Since I left ITMob, it has had a very nice facelift. I'll post its address when the site doesn't require a username and password.

I developed a recruiting tool called the OPViewer (for Open Position Viewer) for use in counseling recruits about what they might do in Wycliffe. It was based on MS Access, with data downloaded from a corporate source. Two or three clicks got you where you needed to be in seconds. The functionality was later incorporated into the web-based corporate system called Insite.

Prior to early 2004, we collected each recruit's work and skill information via a 6-page MS Word document we sent them for editing. We needed a smarter, web-based system to eliminate dependency on Microsoft and to make our own internal handling of the information more efficient. I conceived the Professional Skills Inventory system in 2002, and a prototype of it was built by a JAARS summer intern in 2003. A volunteering web developer rewrote it in Ruby on Rails in 2004 and by late 2005 it had become a standard part of the IT recruiting process.

Phil Robertson, my first supervisor, and I conceived the idea of Check-IT-Out in 2004 as a recruiting event aimed at Christian IT professionals. The idea languished for several years because there was no staff to run it. God provided Caryl Mallory, and Check-IT-Out became reality. See http://www.jaars.org/checkitout for more details.

This is a view of the June 2006 Seattle Check-IT-Out from the rear of the room.

Still in Seattle. Jim Moore, the Director of JAARS IT Mobilization (and my boss), and I worked on the setup for a live Skype-based interview with Ed Underwood, an IT missionary in Burkina Faso. Ed sent me photos, which I assembled into a PowerPoint presentation, so that I could show Ed's IT role while he answered questions.

This is the "Ministry Promotion" table at Check-IT-Out, something I devised to promote the ministries of individual Wycliffe IT missionaries. Check-IT-Out is about connecting Christian IT professionals to the Great Commission in ALL ways. Financial and prayer support of individual IT missionaries is crucial, and this display introduced about 50 Wycliffe IT workers to the conference attendees.

I am speaking in one of the three major presentations I had during the Check-IT-Out held at the JAARS center in January 2007.