High Tech Pipeline

An excerpt from the Atlantic -

Getting High-School Grads Into the Closed-Off World of Tech
A Silicon Valley program is matching young, lower-income workers with employers eager to diversify their ranks
By ALANA SEMUELS

SAN JOSE—On a recent weekday, an unlikely crew of 18-to-24 year-olds gathered in a classroom in an office building, proving wrong a mantra often heard in economic development: Training programs aren’t effective at getting people good jobs.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the students, mostly minorities from poor families, will tinker with computers, hone their e-mail skills,work on PowerPoint presentations, and even practice giving professional handshakes. And in a few months’ time, the 80 students will move on to coveted internships in Silicon Valley, all the more impressive since the students do not have college degrees.

This is Year Up, a training program that serves more than 3,000 students nationwide every year and that is effective in getting people without college degrees into good jobs. The model solves a growing problem in a tight economy: Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in low-paying jobs with little room for upward mobility, while employers complain that they can’t find enough qualified workers for jobs that don’t require college degrees. Year Up takes students who might not otherwise know how to negotiate the working world and gives them the skills they need to make it in in-demand jobs. After six months of intense training in a classroom and counseling from mentors, it connects them with six-month internships in fields like business, technology, and finance. The students in the San Jose classroom will move on to internships doing IT support or as administrative support staff at companies like Google, Salesforce, Facebook, and Tesla. In many cases, those internships will lead to full-time employment. Year Up also pays students a stipend while they go through the program.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/training-for-tech-jobs/522921/