The plan for Michael Schirling '92 G '05 following his retirement in June of 2015 as chief of the Burlington Police Department was to take a little time off, do some consulting and plot his next career move. That lasted two months.
A call from local officials looking to hire Burlington’s first executive director of BTV Ignite, an organization that encourages public, private and academic institutions to capitalize on the city's massive high-speed gigabit infrastructure and to grow the tech economy, was too good to pass up.
“I saw it as a really unique opportunity to help advance the community in a new and potentially powerful way,” says Schirling, who started working part-time for the Burlington Police as an undergraduate majoring in political science.
Long hours spent helping his community began for Schirling as a junior at Burlington High School while working for Colchester Rescue. It continued when he arrived at UVM in the fall of 1988 and joined UVM Rescue, eventually volunteering and working for three local rescue and police departments at one time.
"I did it because I loved it," Schirling says. "I mean where else could a 20-year-old make a difference in the lives of people on the ground as part of a larger team?"
Following graduation, Schirling worked briefly for a local computer company before joining the Burlington Police full-time, spending the next 25 years working his way into the top position. During that time he entertained the idea of joining the FBI and was offered a job with the agency in Baltimore. Ultimately, he and his wife decided to remain in Vermont to work and raise a family.
On the surface, Schirling's hiring at BTV Ignite seemed an unconventional choice. But the self-described computer geek had built a national reputation as a tech chief for constructing his own online records management system, helping build internet investigations and computer forensic capacity for the State of Vermont, and co-founding the Digital Forensics program at Champlain College.
“What I told them at the interview was that if they were looking for someone to build the technical network that’s not me,” says Schirling, a Burlington native. “But for the intersection of operations and technology and blending them together to simplify people’s lives, that’s the lens I can bring to the conversation.”
Schirling is also known as a coalition builder -- a skill that has proven critical to the success of some of the other 25 U.S. Ignite cities. One of his main objectives is to bring together the talent and resources of the City of Burlington, UVM and the UVM Medical Center, Champlain College, Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, Burlington Telecom, and Bluewater Group/Dorman & Fawcett, and Burlington Electric. Each entity paid $25,000 to support the six core areas US Ignite: education, healthcare, public safety, energy, the economy and advanced manufacturing.
“I’m just one little piece of this broad and talented coalition trying to help leverage the capacity we already have, which includes phenomenal bandwidth and a fiber optic infrastructure that is unparalleled,” he says. “There are a lot of vacant tech jobs in Vermont, so we plan to help prepare Vermont’s workforce to meet the needs of a 21st century economy, which has technology woven through every component of it.”