Why can’t companies fill high-pay jobs? New Columbia program trains students for free
Before becoming a mother, Caroline Turner worked a variety of jobs in her early 20s — waitress, bartender, dog groomer.
After spending the past couple years at home with her 2- and 3-year-old children, she couldn’t imagine giving up the time with her family only to go back to a low-paying, hourly job. But she was ready to take steps toward a new professional chapter in her life. What, though?
“I’ve been trying to brainstorm career ideas and what I could do without having to go back and get a four-year college degree,” Turner said. “There’s so many things (I felt like) ‘I could do this,’ but the barrier to entry is really high.”
Computer programming crossed her radar as a well-paying career path, but she was put off by the time and expense it would take to get a four-year computer science degree or enroll in an intensive coding boot camp. Much less had anyone ever given her the idea that she’d have the skills to be successful in a tech career.
Turner, 28, is the type of person a new Columbia-area program is seeking to transport into a software engineering pipeline. Frankly, program leaders say, anyone just might be the right person; that principle is the very backbone of Create Opportunity Columbia.
“How many times in your life have you been told you would make an amazing software engineer?” said Ben Rex, founder and president of Columbia’s Cyberwoven web development company, who also helped conceive the Create Opportunity Columbia program. “The reality is that while that question is much more likely to be asked today than it was 10-20 years ago, just basic awareness of the career and that it is accessible (is a barrier).
“It’s really a question of removing the personal bias of ‘I could never become a software engineer.’”
The Midlands region has two problems that go hand-in-hand, Rex said. First, too many people are unemployed or underemployed, working low-paying jobs beneath their natural skill level. At the same time, he said, there’s a shortage of computer programming employees. Local companies have good-paying jobs to offer, but there aren’t enough qualified candidates to fill them.
Enter Create Opportunity Columbia, a partnership between Midlands Technical College, local businesses seeking trained employees, and local financial backers including Columbia and Richland County governments.
The newly launched program includes a six-month, tuition-free software engineering certification class at Midlands Tech and a two-year paid apprenticeship with local companies, which currently include Cyberwoven, Colonial Life, Nephron, and Diesel Laptops. The program’s goal is for participants to land full-time jobs after their apprenticeships and be well-positioned to pursue further education and high-paying employment in the community.
“The skills gap is so clear when we say we’ve got jobs without people and people without jobs,” said Midlands Tech provost Barrie Kirk. Employers “are posting these jobs, and they’re going unfilled. We’ve got these potential students that are obviously needing a career or needing a path forward. This program just so beautifully aligns the two of those.”
Turner is one of about 10 students in the program’s first class. They’re a few weeks into their six-month online curriculum. Turner describes the class as fast-paced and supportive, with much of the work so far focused on problem-solving using basic internet searching and plugging in solutions to create working computer code.
“I think that anybody could learn how to code … because so much of it is just Googling and just applying logic,” she said.
Women make up more than half of the first cohort of students, and people of color make up more than a third of the class, said Beth Ruffin, managing director of Create Opportunity Columbia. They include people who have lost jobs and people who are looking for new careers.
“They come from diverse backgrounds, but the thing they had in common was they wanted a change,” Ruffin said.
One goal of Create Opportunity is to help increase the diversity of employees in software engineering jobs to better represent the community at large and to help improve pay equity in the community.
While the majority of people working in the field are white men, the results of the Create Opportunity online assessment show that men and women across all ages, races, socioeconomic backgrounds and geographies are nearly equally skilled to succeed in the field. What they lack, program leaders said, are equal opportunities to access the education and jobs.
“When you think of education, the majority of software engineering jobs now require a four-year degree. So from a socioeconomic standpoint, how does that eliminate people from entering a career like that?” Ruffin said.
The first step to entering the Create Opportunity program is completing a free, 90-minute online assessment. It’s a screening tool created by Baltimore-based software company Catalyte, which aims to identify tech talent free of demographic bias. The screening has been used around the country to identify strong candidates likely to succeed in software engineering.
So far, almost 400 people have taken the online assessment through Create Opportunity Columbia since last summer, Ruffin said. It is available for anyone to take at www.createopp.com. People who perform well on the assessment will be contacted with the opportunity to participate in the training and apprenticeship program.
The next cohort of the class at Midlands Tech begins May 17, with another class starting in August.
