APPROACH’S RESULTS ENCOURAGING
manufacturing once was,” said Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “We have to move toward a system that works.”
The skills-based concept is gaining momentum, with nonprofit organizations, schools, state governments and companies, typically in partnerships, beginning to roll out such efforts. Last week, the approach received a strong corporate endorsement from Microsoft, which announced a grant of more than $25 million to help Skillful, a program to foster skills-oriented hiring, training and education. The initiative, led by the Markle Foundation, began last year in Colorado, and Microsoft’s grant will be used to expand it there and move it into other states.
“We need new approaches, or we’re going to leave more and more people behind in our economy,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.
It is unclear whether a relative handful of skills-centered initiatives can train large numbers of people and alter hiring practices broadly. But the skillsbased approach has already yielded some early and encouraging results in the technology industry, which may provide a model for other industries.
These jobs have taken off in tech for two main reasons. For one, computing skills tend to be well defined. Writing code, for example, is a specific task, and success or failure can be tested and measured. At the same time, the demand for tech skills is surging.
One tech project that has expanded rapidly is Techhire, which was created in 2015 and is the flagship program of Opportunity@work, a nonprofit social enterprise. Techhire provides grants and expertise to train workers around the country and link them to jobs by nurturing local networks of job seekers, trainers and companies.
In just two years, Techhire’s network has grown to 72 communities, 237 training organizations and 1,300 employers. It has helped place more than 4,000 workers in jobs.
Techhire’s mission is partly to chip away at “the cultural hegemony of the bachelor’s degree,” said Byron Auguste, president of Opportunity@ Work.
Nichole Clark of Paintsville, Ky., heard a radio ad last year for Techhire Eastern Kentucky. The program offered six months of training in software programming that included working with a company while being paid $400 a week. That was not much less than what Clark, now 24, was making as a manager at Pizza Hut.
Without a college degree, Clark said, her horizons seemed confined to low-wage jobs in fast-food restaurants, retail stores or doctors’ offices. The Techhire program, she said, could be “a doorway to a good-paying job, which is everything here.”
Clark made it through online screening tests and an interview and got into the program. TechHire’s role varies, and it often funds training grants, but in this program it solicited applicants and advised and shared best practices with Interapt, a software development and consulting company. The training stipends were paid for with a $2.7 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
After four months of taking all-day classes on the basics of writing software and two months of working in an internship alongside Interapt developers, Clark was hired by Interapt in May. As a member of the team that performs software quality assurance and testing, she is now paid more than $40,000 a year, about double what she made at Pizza Hut.
Clark is growing confident about her employment future. “Thereareendlessrolesyoucan play, if you have these skills,” she said.
In Rocket Center, where rocket engines were once built and some composite materials for U.S. fighter jets are manufactured today, IBM occupies a few buildings and employs 350 people, including Bridges. They are working on cloud computing, cybersecurity, application development and help desks.
In the last two years, nearly a third of IBM’S new hires there and in a few other locations have not had four-year college degrees. IBM has jointly developed curriculums with the local community college, as well as one-year and two-year courses aligned with the company’s hiring needs.
For companies like IBM, which has 5,000 job openings in the United States, new-collar workers can help it meet its workforce needs — and do it inexpensively if those workers are far away from urban centers, where the cost of living and prevailing wages are higher.
“It makes sense for our business, for the job candidates and for the communities,” said Sam Ladah, IBM’S vice president for talent.
The company, which stopped disclosing its U.S. employment in 2007 and regularly cuts jobs in declining businesses, declined to say whether it was increasing its total domestic workforce.
But at the West Virginia center, IBM plans to hire up to 250 people this year, including more like Bridges.
“Now, we’re recruiting for skills,” Ladah said.