Posted on 04/16/2017 8:40:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A year ago, Shawn Farrow worked full time as a mover, hauling boxes for wealthy tech engineers in Seattle. These days, Farrow isn't just lugging furniture for tech workers. He's a tech worker himself.
Farrow is an apprentice engineer, writing code from the comfort of his desk at Avvo, a Seattle tech firm. He is a fresh breed of tech worker coming into the industry through a new type of training program that is designed to identify talented individuals from non-traditional backgrounds.
"It's more rewarding for me coming to an office and using my brain rather than my physical abilities," Farrow says. "It's a different kind of fatigue, but it's rewarding."
Tech apprenticeships are a fairly new concept in the U.S., but as the Trump administration makes it more difficult for American companies to hire or attract foreign workers, experts predict that more U.S. firms could embrace this type of training program to fill entry-level technical roles.
"Apprenticeships are a terrific way for people to take non-traditional routes and for companies to accept those people," says Todd Thibodeaux, CEO of CompTIA, a tech association focused on helping closing the gap between the industry's talent demands and the work force's supply.
Already, the Trump administration has followed through on the president's anti-immigration campaign rhetoric with several actions, most notably its two litigation-encumbered immigration bans. Of greater impact, Trump has suspended an expedited approval process for H-1B visas, which the tech industry often relies on to bring highly talented foreigners to the U.S. And most recently, the administration issued a clarification on the wording of the program, stating that being a computer programmer alone "is not sufficient to establish the position as a specialty occupation."
We've yet to see the exact impact this clarification will have on the next wave of H-1B visa applicants, but many in the tech industry are expecting this action will make it more difficult for lower-skill foreign tech workers -- such as junior developers, network administrators, and quality assurance specialists -- to receive documents necessary to work in the U.S. That is why some now believe that tech apprenticeships could receive a boost in interest from American tech companies.
"One of the biggest barriers is that employers must be willing to accept the idea of apprenticeship programs," says Charles Eaton, executive vice president of social innovation at CompTIA. "Regardless of the H-1B program, the tech industry is still having to find talent. They are right now hiring from each other. Most of those job openings are filled by people who already have jobs."
Already, companies like Yelp, Pinterest, and Atlassian have dabbled in apprenticeships as a way to get more women and people of color into their engineering ranks. Regardless of the fate of the H-1B program, which brings in about 100,000 foreign workers to the U.S. each year, the talent shortage keeps growing. By the year 2020, as many as one million programming jobs in the U.S. could go unfilled, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Changes do suggest that companies are going to have to be more innovative in the ways that they go about finding talent for junior-level and entry-level programming positions," says Jeff Mazur, vice president of partnerships at LaunchCode, a nonprofit organization that runs an apprenticeship program.
LaunchCode, which has been around for three and a half years, claims to have started 700 tech careers through its programs. The organization identifies talented individuals who have taught themselves tech skills through non-traditional routes, such as coding bootcamps, self-teaching, or LaunchCode's own courses. The organization vets the individuals by interviewing them and having them take a technical assessment. If they pass, LaunchCode will recommend them to its employer partners, of which there are 400, including companies like Boeing, General Electric, and Riot Games, Inc.'s 2016 Company of the Year.
"The tech industry relies heavily on candidates with four-year college degrees, and if we continue to rely entirely on those candidates, we're never going to close the gap," Mazur says.
Among the fastest growing tech apprenticeship programs in the U.S. is Apprenti. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Labor in 2015 provided the funding that was used to create this pilot apprenticeship program through a grant that draws its money from fees paid for H-1B visas. Apprenti works with notable Washington tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, to get workers like Farrow into the industry.
Apprenti, which launched in September 2016, identifies and vets talented individuals, with priority given to women, minorities, and veterans. The program then recommends apprentices to companies as their needs arise. Individuals involved with Apprenti are qualified to be trained for roles as software developers, web developers, project managers, Windows systems administrators, Linux systems administrators, network security administrators, and database administrators. The apprentices undergo multiweek training, and if successful, they are given a yearlong contract by their companies, which pay Apprenti a placement fee.
Thus far, Apprenti has placed 40 apprentices, with plans to expand. At its creation, the goal was to place 600 apprentices in Washington by 2020. Accelerating that, Apprenti is franchising its model and planning to expand through other nonprofit organizations around the country with the goal of nationally placing at least 450 apprentices annually starting this year.
For the companies, the benefit is they bring someone who they can mold to their preferences at a financially friendly salary of $45,000 a year, says Jennifer Carlson, the executive director of the Washington Technology Industry Association Workforce Institute, which operates Apprenti.
"The company gets that financial benefit, the individual gets that training to become successful, and we've now created another body for the industry," Carlson says.
I do like this… It was once common, called OJT, or on-the-job-training. Why haven’t the over-IQed tech titans thought of this simple solution before?
Back in the day most jobs had apprenticeships programs and it worked out very well.
-—not a new idea-—the Climax mine in Colorado did a similar operation in the early and mid-’60’s—allowed employees to take an aptitude test and then had training for those qualifying as programmers-—Fortran was the rage then-—
I worked in IT from 1978 to 2014.
Back in the old days, before the middle 90s, every organization had a bunch of mediocre people to perform routine tasks. The pay was OK, and people had jobs.
Nowadays, if you want a testing group or an operations group, you typically locate the entire function in India, or at least most of it. The salaries are not as low as people think, but for $20-30K you can fill up an office in Mumbai or Bangalore with less-than-brilliant people who can do the day-to-day work.
Realistic speaking, only the most difficult tasks are still done in the US. When I worked, we did support, but it was third-level support. When there was a problem, the help desk in India, and then the Operations group in India, both had a crack at it. Only when they were stuck was the ticket transferred to the US developers.
>Win/win.
Agreed. As a degreed CS person in the IT space, I completely agree that it’s not the only way to be capable — although it’s certainly a help! We don’t want the professorial class to be the sole gatekeepers.
Hopefully ‘apprenticeship’ doesn’t turn into code for SJW recruitment or exercises in duckspeaking and doublethink.
Lo and behold, a lot of companies operated by politicians pals and other extortionists sprang up that for a fee would take care of the whole process and keep the company from ending up in the news for "discrimination" or some other horrible offense like being "insensitive to cultural norms".
Shortly thereafter, it became obvious that it was very easy to hire illegal aliens because you would be held harmless since you had left all the details of screening applicants to a company hired for that purpose.
Odd how that worked out, huh?
...discriminates against white men, and women and children of traditional households, where white men are the bread winner. Why does our culture have this death wish?
White men aren’t veterans?
As someone who has worked in the computer software industry for 33 years, I love this.
Not exactly tech, but Ford Motor Co used to hire the best and brightest engineering graduates.
Their first day on the job they were handed brooms, shovels and other implements of manual labor.
Those best and brightest had to perform every job in the plant before they were allowed near a design team.
Those engineers went on to design some of the best cars sold in the US, including the Mustang.
Lee Iacocca started out that way.
Apprenticeships work.
For someone claiming to have been IT for so long, you are lacking in critical thinking skills. Do you actually think all men are veterans? White men are the only group that has a bias against them in the article's priority statement. After all, women and minorities can be veterans too. sigh.
Indeed. My former company ran it’s own apprenticeship program for skilled trades (tool and mold makers mostly). The program was highly effective - it took 4 years to complete and those employees were not only very good but also loyal and many worked 30+ years. Then the 28 year-old beancounters figured the work could be outsourced to India or China. Five years later guess what? They had to restart the apprenticeship program in order to get any kind of quality work done. But by then of course the now 33-year-old MBA had received two promtions, and was working as a director for a competitor.
In my profession, I used to size up the potential of a new hire by having them sweep up an area. It is amazing how much you can tell about a person by observing them use a broom.
You’d get a kick out of the tweet I read that other day, some cupcake had volunterred to help do clean-up work after some local mishap and was ticked off to be reprimanded by the leader for his sweeping skills. But then the person said they realized that it really WAS more efficient to move the broom one way instead of going back-and-forth like they’d started out doing. Kinda unbeleivable that this was a college-age person, not a 4 year-old.
I’ve never claimed to be in IT in any way, shape or form. I was a career counselor and recruiter. I barely have the technical skills to post here.
Because they are a bunch of greedy scumbags who would rather hire an Indian to save 50 bucks a week than train some American red neck.
What these self aggrandizing bastards do is not brain surgery, there are millions of Americans that can easily be taught.
America First!
Truly, it’s a litmus test.
Exactly.
If someone who does the lowest most menial job as if it were the most important job in the world, thats someone who will perform all their tasks to the best of their ability. That is someone you can depend on.
It will tell you all you need to know. Better by far than any resume or interview. A person is revealed in how they sweep.
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