Three primary pillar activities drive the IT Careers Camp program strategy – 1) hands-on, behind-the-scenes problem-solving encounters with technology, 2) face-to-face "early recruitment" encounters with IT executives who are seriously interested in the students as future employees, and 3) a service learning encounter that brings to the students a chance to use their creativity to make a significant impact on the quality of life of those less fortunate than they.

A host university conducts several one-week summer sessions, each session enrolling twenty 10th grade students nominated by participating high schools. The students are divided into four competing teams of five, each team sponsored by a local company ("Team P&G", "Team Cintas", etc.), and assigned a full-time faculty member from one of the participating high schools as their Team Advisor.

As pillar #1, each morning the four teams go on behind-the-scenes site visits to the sponsor companies, "battling for points" in problem-solving competitions designed to show how IT is used to support operations. Past field trips have included places like Ethicon Endo-Surgery (they try their hands at surgery simulators/trainers), the P&G Envision Center (they experience how P&G uses 3D virtual reality for business decision support), and the U.C. IT Center for Surgical Innovation (the students “play” with the DaVinci surgery robot that facilitates remote robotic surgery).

In the more traditional business venues, the problem-solving is just as intense. At sponsors like Kroger, Great American Insurance, Cintas, and Fifth Third Bank, the student teams compete to solve complex, sometimes not-yet-solved business challenges that confront the local sponsors. Challenges include how a Kroger store manager can use mobile technology to handle all required management reporting while still walking around the store... How Cintas can minimize waste in manufacturing by using software to squeeze every last possible pant leg or shirt sleeve out of a bolt of cloth... How Great American Insurance can use software to help them figure out just how risky a new enterprise is that needs insurance coverage... How Fifth Third's retail lockbox service uses IT and technology to open, read, and process literally thousands of customer payment envelopes each hour.

As pillar #2, each day the students have lunch with CIOs and senior IT executives from the local sponsoring companies. These executives offer their business cards to the students, encouraging them to send personal emails with questions about college and possible career paths. They also use the encounters to begin an early recruitment process, building impressions and connections that will hopefully attract and entice the brightest students to employment interviews when they graduate.

Pillar #3 is all about community service and using your talents and creativity to serve others, especially those with life challenges of a physical, medical, or socioeconomic nature. The four teams spend every afternoon working on a technology design, invention, or website that harnesses IT to solve one or more problems for a non-profit "customer". In 2006, one session of students competed with designs for a "job board" website for the Citizen's Committee on Youth, who finds summer employment for students from the urban core. In 2007, the students entered the first annual "Communication Enhancer Inventor's Competition", in which the teams designed a device using IT that would improve the ability of a child or adult with disabilities from Stepping Stones Center to communicate. Judges from Stepping Stones critiqued the designs, selected a "best in show" winner, and all 16 designs (4 teams x 4 sessions in 2007) are now available for the students to "build" as part of their high school chapters, in partnership with university students and engineering-type representatives from the corporate sponsors.  2008 saw the addition of Abilities First in Middletown as a "customer" of the Miami University INTERalliance IT Careers Camps program, and Redwood Rehab in Ft Mitchell, Kentucky serving as "customer" for the students participating at NKU.  Eight one-week sessions in 2008 yielded 32 designs, many of them truly "ready for market".