TechHire focuses on hiring based on skills
Albuquerque one of the founding communities for innovative program
In today’s economy, technology is changing the nature of work — businesses can locate anywhere, and some traditional jobs are in decline while new industries are emerging. Technology jobs are projected to see some of the fastest growth over the coming years and, even today, over half a million jobs are currently open in information technology (IT) fields. In Albuquerque alone, there are 1,000 open tech jobs, and the average salary in a job that requires IT skills — whether in manufacturing, retail, or banking — is 50 percent higher than in others.
Preparing people for the jobs of the future presents a big challenge and a big opportunity. The good news is that innovative training and hiring solutions already exist in communities across the country in places like Albuquerque.
In March 2015, President Obama launched TechHire (whitehouse. gov/techhire), a program that aims to get people into good technology jobs without having to spend years getting a new degree. In doing so, the president called on employers, training programs, local governments, workforce development organizations and others to tap into tech talent that may be hiding in plain sight.
Albuquerque was one of the 21 founding TechHire communities. Albuquerque recognized that a key challenge to getting many people into tech jobs is a lack of education and experience to make it past employer hiring screens. So Albuquerque designed an approach called “skills based hiring.” It’s a pretty simple concept — workers get to prove their skills to employers, and get hired based on those skills, not their pedigree. While it sounds straightforward, this approach is a radical shift from typical hiring models that focus on traditional education instead of actual skills that may have been gained through nontraditional experiences.
Since Albuquerque launched this model in 2013, local businesses have hired close to 1,000 candidates using this new approach, and over 200 local employers have joined the program, Talent ABQ. By eliminating requirements that kept otherwise qualified workers from jobs, employers like GE Digital, JP Morgan, and Capital One have saved money by reducing the time and cost it takes to hire someone. Albuquerque’s hiring approach is just one of many examples of local practices that TechHire has spread around the country. As the president put it when he launched TechHire, “It turns out, it doesn’t matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are in writing code.”
And this is just the beginning for TechHire. On Wednesday, the White House brought together over 100 technologists, innovators and community leaders from dozens of TechHire cities, including Albuquerque. Leaders shared details on what’s working in their own communities and expanded on their 2017 plans. And earlier this month the U.S. Department of Education announced a partnership with a nonprofit to coordinate across communities and continue growing the TechHire network in the coming months and years.