Igor Irkho — Curriculum Vitae

Igor “Gary” Irkho — Curriculum Vitae

Architect, builder, instructor, and project manager based in the Washington, DC metro area; glad to travel, domestically or internationally, to meet partners, collaborators, and participants. What I do here, and why, is on my Opplet page; this is the fuller career account behind it.

Experience

Principal Architect — Opplet, a project of The Economic Group ongoing. Designed and run a multi-node, self-hosted sovereign infrastructure: a Proxmox/ZFS cluster behind a hardened edge router, with a dual-directory identity model separating personal and professional domains, automated operations and recruitment pipelines, and a tested disaster-recovery regime. At its center is Opplet IAM — the identity and user-management system that holds participant records and feeds OpenLDAP across the enclave. It began around 2007–2008 as a technique I developed to keep each learner’s work tied to their own account, so I could gather richer feedback and tailor the curriculum to the individual; I built it to support my own university teaching in Belarus and Russia, and have carried and rebuilt it ever since. Opplet is the technological foundation of Educaship (below); it doubles as a meritocratic training forge — the place where the builder and the teacher in me finally run on the same metal — and it is open and inspectable on purpose, a complete system anyone can examine, run, or fork.

Director — The Economic Group, Okemos, MI (clients worldwide) 2004–present. The Economic Group is the U.S. continuation of work begun in Belarus, where my colleagues and I first ran the Economic Salon — a forum for economic ideas backed by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy — and then founded the Economic Club, a non-profit my mother, an economist, led as president. When a government crackdown on the country’s civil sector closed the Club in 2004, I re-registered it in Michigan to carry its work forward, soon renaming it The Economic Group. I serve as a director, have led its technology work for two decades, and today architect its Opplet project (above). Much of my independent training work has been delivered and credentialed through The Economic Group — the certificates for my CNMCyber programs, among others, were issued in its name. The throughline across all of it is a single body of work: building systems that let people learn by doing.

AI Project Manager — Virginia Institute of Technology LLC, Chantilly, VA (with a development partner in Eastern Europe) 2023–2025. Future of Work Is AI was a free introductory lecture on chatbots and prompting — built around ChatGPT — followed by hands-on training delivered over Jitsi, with plans to extend it onto Proxmox VE virtual machines. My partner ran it as a revenue stream for about a year; I prototyped and kept developing the training with two collaborators and tried to market it in the Washington, DC area, before other priorities drew me away in early 2025. Like most introductory AI content, the material has since dated.

Project Manager — Virginia Institute of Technology LLC, Chantilly, VA (with a development partner in Vinnytsia, Ukraine) 2017–2018. An independent venture to put “purposeful practice” on its own footing. With a like-minded partner in Vinnytsia, I set out to build an assessment, hands-on training, and certification tool that hands each learner or job candidate a live Proxmox VE virtual machine to work on — competence measured by what a person can actually do, not by a test score. The name took on a life of its own; a number of participants list Virginia Institute of Technology on their own professional profiles.

Architect — Educaship Alliance LLC 2016–2025. Educaship is my model for fusing education, career management, and hands-on practice into one repeating cycle; Educaship Alliance LLC was the vehicle through which I developed it. Its parts: WorldOpp, the methodology, whose “Career Pipeline” carries a person from employability concepts through guided practice to internship, guidance, and support; KenyaX, the Kenya-region brand for the work — successor to an earlier Ukrainian initiative, idosvid (“and experience”), set aside when the war made that base untenable — envisioned as a first real employer and proving ground where apprentices take on real tasks; and WiseNxt, an overview-practice program in which pre-graduation high-schoolers try on non-managerial and then coordinating roles before committing to a path.

Instructor — Shanghai Jian Qiao University (with Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology), Shanghai 2018–2023. Taught business and management courses to undergraduates in airport-management and aviation-maintenance programs. Because Vaughn was initially reluctant to host the Shanghai students on its own system, through 2019 I ran the courses on my own platform, building and refining it after teaching hours; the program moved onto Vaughn’s learning-management system in 2021.

Volunteer Developer — Career Network Ministry (CNM), Vienna, VA 2018–2022. Built out the CNMCyber platform across hundreds of systems — compute servers, virtual environments, middleware, and end-user applications. I led the systems design, made the final architecture decisions, and did the work of selecting, integrating, configuring, and connecting the pieces into a working whole. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, I added a free job-search course as part of CNMCyber.

Talent and Training Systems (under non-disclosure) — confidential investment group 2014–2019. Designed and built the recruiting, onboarding, and training systems for an investment group, under strict non-disclosure, and ran the recruiting myself — though not in the conventional sense: rather than working databases, cold calls, or formal interviews, I pitched the opportunity at events and channeled promising people into a practice-based pipeline that let their work, not their résumés, make the case. It is the work I am proudest of and the work I can say least about: I can describe the shape of it — selecting and developing people for roles defined by uncertainty rather than by job descriptions — but I cannot put it on a table and point to it. Opplet is, in part, my answer to that constraint: the work I can show.

Independent teaching, curriculum, and development work — NY, Washington, DC metro, and remote 2007–2019. A guest presentation at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (2009); business courses developed and taught for universities in Russia and Belarus (2008–2009), delivered on the learning system I had built — the basis of today’s Opplet IAM; and technology programs for school-age students (2015–2018), run as an official Microsoft partner with sessions hosted at Microsoft Stores and the Mott Center, where I saw first-hand how much faster people learn when they are allowed to try, fail, and try again.

Volunteer Hands-On Training Leader — Career Network Ministry (CNM), Vienna, VA 2012–2018. Led hands-on training at a non-profit job club, where I volunteered to stay close to people in career transition. Designed and led training for 3,200+ people in accounting, project management (PMBOK), software development (Agile), and web languages (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP). One participant — a print-publishing veteran of 25 years — came through our Web Dev Fast Track and was hired as Director of Web Operations at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; federal contractors, meanwhile, used the platform to run their own SharePoint-administrator courses. The hands-on training community I started here — which I also grew through a public meetup group — became, after several names, the CNMCyber platform.

Project Director — U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Washington, DC 2012–2018. As a subcontractor, directed projects for the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) — the same program I had taken part in as an alumnus years earlier.

Adjunct Instructor, Management — Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, Flushing, NY 2009–2018. Taught undergraduate management courses remotely.

Consultant — Ural Federal University (via The Economic Group), Yekaterinburg, Russia 2006–2014. Advised university leadership on the Bologna Accord, learning management systems, and educational software.

Culture Instructor — U.S. Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL), Quantico, VA 2010–2011. As a full-time employee of Professional Solutions LLC — the program’s Marine Corps contractor — I held Marine Corps credentials and headed the Russian portion of an experimental language-and-culture program. With my supervisor’s agreement, I developed the curriculum and delivered it through my own learning platform — the system I now run as Opplet — working the program by day and building it out after hours. I rebuilt the course around frequency-based vocabulary and media-driven listening, and added personal dashboards that tracked each learner’s gaps. On my own initiative, I extended the work into curricula for the Marine Corps’ Flight Student Language Program.

Adjunct Instructor, Business — SUNY Westchester Community College, Valhalla, NY 2006–2007. Taught marketing and international business to undergraduates. Conscious that my accent could get in the way, I built a course website and published my materials there — the first time I put IT to work in my teaching.

Earlier — Belarus

Founder & Director — Belinformbureau, Minsk 1993–2004. Founded and led a company that grew past 100 employees — the principal business of that period — which was ultimately sold after I emigrated to the United States in 2004. It published several newspapers, including the in-demand advertising paper Ljuboy Kapriz (“Any Whim”), and ran a printing agency. Its success rested on highly computerized production and sales operations; on the sales side, I personally designed and built two of its defining features — a segmentation model that treated different tiers of advertising customers differently, and a custom-coded CRM and accounting system.

Director — Mogilevservice, Mogilev 1991–1993. Initiated the creation of a government agency and later spun it off as a private company in contract brokerage — sourcing contractors and managing the contracts. Its key feature was the payroll and accounting system I designed.

Managing Director — Youth Initiative Foundation, under the Youth Communist Union’s (Komsomol) Mogilev City Committee 1988–1991. Directed the foundation’s projects, including a new youth café and my hometown’s first cable-television station.

Mechanical Supervisor — Mogilevkhimvolokno, Mogilev 1986–1988. Supervised mechanics maintaining and repairing production equipment.

Competencies

Architecture & integration. Designing self-hosted systems and assembling them from open-source components — selecting, integrating, configuring, and wiring the pieces into a coherent whole, then keeping it running. Data layers across SQL and NoSQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB); service integration over RESTful APIs; version control with Git/GitLab. I wrote the original PHP behind Opplet IAM years ago; today I work mainly at the level of architecture and integration, reading and adapting code more than authoring it.

Infrastructure & security. Linux/Ubuntu administration and the LAMP stack; Proxmox virtualization and OpenZFS; hardened edge routing and firewalls; identity and access management (Opplet IAM, OpenLDAP, Authentik, SAML2/OAuth 2.0/OpenID); secure mesh networking; web servers (Nginx, Apache); DNS/DNSSEC, TLS/SSL. Automated backup, monitoring, and disaster recovery.

Platforms I’ve deployed and run. Learning systems (Moodle); ERP (Odoo, ERPNext); content and collaboration (HumHub, BookStack, Hugo SSG); developer tooling (GitLab, Discourse); conferencing (Jitsi); workflow automation (n8n).

Design & production. Adobe Creative Suite, Inkscape.

Credentials

M.B.A., Business Administration — Belarusian State University, Minsk M.S. / B.S., Mechanical Engineering — Belarusian-Russian University (formerly the Mogilev Machine-Building Institute), Mogilev

Project Management Professional (PMP) — Project Management Institute ITIL Foundation, IT Service Management — AXELOS

Alumnus (2001), International Visitor Program, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.