From the first moment one is asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” most Americans begin to form a narrative about securing a path to meaningful, lucrative, and sustainable employment, and this path is pretty straightforward—earn a four-year degree at a prestigious university, land a great internship, pay your dues at an established firm, and after five years, you’ll be able to make a shift to your ideal position. Although a computer science degree from a top tier university like Harvard or Yale in the northeast, University of Chicago or Northwestern University in the Midwest, or Stanford or Berkeley in the West, will always be an asset to securing the most competitive positions in the IT field, a new trend is emerging in major cities like Denver, Los Angeles, and New York City: skill-based employment. In other words, more and more firms are throwing out the resumes and opting for skilled workers regardless of their experiences with higher education, or even their experiences at other firms—ensuring their workforce is skilled by doing the testing or training themselves.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Steve Lohr describes a specific example of this phenomenon by telling the story of Sean Bridges. Bridges had no work history, but he had studied information technology at a community college. Now he works for IBM as a computer security analyst. This sort of example, as a former member of the Clinton Administration explains in the article, could be a step toward reviving a “second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was.” In other words, there is a growing need for middle-level skills that aren’t acquired through college education—much like the skills required in manufacturing, which today, has become almost entirely automated. Lohr continues the article by describing the fast-growing project TechHire, a project from the nonprofit Opportunity@Work. TechHire is a network of “72 communities, 237 training organizations and 1,300 employers” and it serves to provide grants and training to people around the United States, a sort of grassroots effort to pair skilled workers with employers. Lohr tells the story of Nichole Clark, a woman who worked for Pizza Hut for $20,000 a year before getting involved with TechHire in Paintsville, Kentucky. After attending a six-month paid apprenticeship program, she secured a job that earned her almost double what she earned at Pizza Hut.
Another great example of this practice of hiring skilled, although uneducated workers for technology jobs in NYC might be the startup Andela. Andela scouts the most promising software developers in the continent of Africa, regardless of their background, and then pairs them with leading software developers who teach them advance coding techniques. Throughout their four-year training program, the recruits receive a salary, and after the successful completion of the program, they are placed at top firms like Microsoft and IBM.
In addition to firms which seek skill-based talent outside of the United States, like Andela, there are massive efforts to shift to skill-based recruitment here at home. Microsoft, for example, has donated 25.8 million dollars to a job training program called Skillful. Skillful pairs anyone with a smartphone with online resources and coaches who will teach them the most sought after skills in the digital workplace, making more people qualified to fill jobs all across the technology sector. Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said in a recent press release that “6 million jobs in our country go unfilled due in large part to a shortage of skilled workers. This mismatch is leaving workers on the sidelines and employers without the talent they need to run their operations.” Think of the implications of this fact. The United States typically has an unemployment rate ranging from around five to ten percent, though right now it’s about 4.3%. With a population of 300 million, that’s about 12.9 million people without jobs. If six million of those people were able to secure employment with these new approaches to recruiting, we could cut our unemployment rate nearly in half.
The New York Times article continues to explain this shift in hiring practices by focusing on IBM. Lohr writes, “In the last two years, nearly a third of IBMS new hires . . . have not had four-year college degrees.” IBM, he says, has over 5,000 job openings and its hiring practices often can serve as a barometer for the hiring practices for many firms in the technology sector.
