BootUpNOLA.gov CHANGING THE FACE OF TECHNOLOGY
- President Barack Obama, National League of Cities Annual Conference March 9th, 2015
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When these tech jobs go unfilled, it’s a missed opportunity for the workers, but it’s also a missed opportunity for your city, your community, your county, your state, and our nation.
BootUpNOLA.com
TECH HIRE TechHire is a $100 million 2015 White House initiative to empower Americans with the tech training that will move them into well-paying careers and reduce the need for foreign H-1B Visas. Universities, community colleges, and nontraditional training providers like “coding boot camps,” and IT certifications can rapidly train workers for well-paying, open jobs, in just a few months. New Orleans was added as a TechHire community in August of 2015 and has created a pathway to training and employment. Renamed BootUpNOLA, the program is expected to be fully funded this summer by a Department of Labor grant. BootUpNOLA is a joint effort between The Network for Economic Opportunity and the city’s Information Technology and Innovation Department.
BootUpNOLA, employees for the 21st century
TECH WORKERS NEEDED New Orleans’ technology sector is experiencing unprecedented growth and, consequently, a shortage of qualified workers. Current local demand is estimated between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs. Responding to this need, the City is expanding the Mayor’s Economic Opportunity Strategy to include technology training and hiring. By leveraging the Economic Opportunity Strategy’s existing infrastructure, the City is developing partnerships around vocational and non-traditional training such as MicroSoft and Cisco certification programs, coding “bootcamps” and online trainings to quickly prepare and connect job seekers to these high paying jobs of the future. Adding these partnerships creates the starting point for a new pathway in the Strategy to careers in technology. Nevertheless, for increased prosperity to be realized, each training opportunity must be designed to result in a job. Accordingly,
the City is partnering with a broad range of private sector industries requiring technology-based expertise – from the well-established IT firms and the newly launched tech startups to the hospitality and healthcare. The Strategy has been designed to demonstrate to business leaders that participation creates the potential to increase prosperity in New Orleans and also for their companies. Resolving the shortage of qualified workers depends on reaching the most underrepresented communities. To facilitate this, we will engage grass-roots and community-based organizations to target non-traditional candidates who may have previously not been considered tech candidates. This engagement aims to raise awareness of the training and job opportunities being created but also helps job seekers reimagine themselves as potential candidates for the opportunities at hand.
For New Orleans to reach full potential, we must ensure no one is left behind. Mayor Landrieu’s Economic Opportunity Strategy seeks to introduce a new way of connecting all New Orleanians to the city’s economic growth through local training providers, social service agencies, anchor institutions and community advocates. Expanding the Strategy to include non-traditional technology training and hiring allows us to quickly prepare and connect job seekers to these high paying jobs of the future. The City of New Orleans is also undertaking an effort to improve digital literacy and broadband adoption rates across the city. Understanding that Internet access is increasingly being thought of as a utility akin to power and water, it is critical for residents to be able to access this resource for effective participation in this 21st-century economy.
INTRODUCING WITH OURSELVES !
OUR WORKFORCE
Of the 76,995 African-American males between 15 and 65 (working age) in New Orleans, a staggering 52% are unemployed, according to a 2014 mayoral report. It also showed that 43.3% have a criminal background. However, the same study also indicated that over 3,000 of those 30,000 unemployed African-American men are interested in a job requiring a technical skill set. This indicates a local, willing labor pool that could fill some of these positions with accessible and free job training. Because a criminal background is often a lifelong barrier to employment and forces individuals into dead-end jobs, government assistance or continued criminal activity, BootUpNOLA’s target is 17-54-yearold men and women with criminal backgrounds. The other 50% will be unemployed and underemployed workers in need of training, or incumbent workers, particularly front-line, lower-skilled, and lower-wage workers who need training to upgrade their skills. In both groups, veterans would receive priority placement
FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS To be eligible for the program, individuals must pass through one of the city’s five Workforce Opportunity Centers which serve as assessment organizations targeting the underrepresented, low-skilled, reentry, unemployed and underemployed populations and include: •
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STRIVE NOLA
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Goodwill Industries
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Total Community Action (TCA)
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The Urban League of Greater New Orleans
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The Veterans Administration
Individuals are assessed as to any barriers that might reduce their chances of success, such as, educational background, computer literacy, financial stability, social or family issues, transportation, language or other barriers. These centers focus on foundational skills, including communications, respect for authority, timeliness, literacy and numeracy, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, teamwork, conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS TRAINING
SUCCESS STORY Four months ago, Michael Easterling couldn’t really even type. He had no college degree and never even thought about working in technology. But all that changes (or changed) on DATE????. the 52 years old, African-American man didn’t really fit the “techy” profile, but he will be the first graduate of one of the city’s Opportunity Centers to complete tech training and move into an IT career. Michael has been hired by the city’s Infomation Technology and Innovation, using his new technology skills on the NOPD Consent Decree. It all started one afternoon in January of this year when, he brought his son to STRIVE NOLA, a 4-week foundational skill training initiative run by the city’s Network for Economic Opportunity. He thought the interpersonal and job skills taught at STRIVE could help his son. His son didn’t enroll, but Michael did. He says he wanted to move forward in a life that was stuck. In February, Michael completed cohort 6, along with 22 other graduates. Michael had been working as a juvenile caseworker in New Orleans courts. Before that, he kept records for the Louisiana Office of Human Resources and then sorted parcels at the post office. He had no aspirations of finding a tech job, especially without a college degree. STRIVE is one of the 5 Opportunity Centers around the city that prepare individuals with significant barriers to employment for life-long careers. This unique public/private partnership focuses on fast-growing industries that move people
out of unemployment and into entry-level work in healthcare, hospitality, construction, advanced manufacturing and technology, where they are needed most After hearing about the technology career training, Michael signed up for a 25-hour online programming course through Operation Spark, a programming school for non-traditional candidates off O.C. Haley Boulevard in Central City. His training was paid for by Spark through a federal grant. The course wasn’t easy. Michael’s typing skills weren’t up to the 30-word-per-minute needed to keep up with a coding class. But Operation Spark helped him increase his speed. Even though he still types a little slow, Michael completed the online course and passed the examination. He then decided to take the next step and enrolled in an instructor taught 60-hour bootcamp at Spark, where he would learn basic aspects of programming including the workflow of building software in a professional environment, command-line, basics of JavaScript, app building in Node.js and HTML5 and team coordination and workforce participation. In April, Michael passed his examination and graduated from Bootcamp. Though he starts working for the city ??date??, he doesn’t plan on slowing down. Michael plans to complete certifications in IT training that could move his career into the $60,000-$90,000 range.
CAREER PATHWAYS
Internet Technology
Cisco Networking
Digit All Systems has a long history of technology training with inner city youths in some of Baltimore’s toughest neighborhoods.
Cisco Systems has established an Authorized Cisco Networking Academy that will provide a full training curriculum for its numerous certifications.
They offer offers training and certification in Microsoft, Office/Excel, CompTIA A+ Technology, Network+, Security+, CCNA and MSCE. Digit All sponsored a “laptops for guns program” in Baltimore where young people got a laptop for turning in a gun. They plan to sponsor this same program in New Orleans.
This will be the first Cisco Academy in the region and will offer high-level certifications and ongoing training for its students. Courses include: CCNA Routing and Switching, Intermediate CCENT and CCNA, CCNA Security, Intermediate CCNA Security, CCNP Routing and Switching, Advanced CCNP, Introduction to the Internet of Everything (IoE), Introduction to Cybersecurity, NDG Linux Essentials, NDG Introduction to Linux, Intermediate CompTIA Linux+ Powered by LPI, and Entrepreneurship. BootUpNOLA will hire a Cisco certified instructor to facilitate this training.
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any well-paying jobs today, and even more in the future, sit in the technology industry now filled with H-1B employees. These jobs, including computer programmers, system analysts, and software developers, accounted for 647,653, or 71 percent of all H1-B visas requested in the U.S. in 2013.[1] According to the Foreign Labor Certification Data Center, IT related jobs rank nationally as seven of the top ten occupations for which foreign workers were temporarily certified. This trend holds true for Louisiana with four of the top five H-1B certification categories being related to technology: Computer Systems Analyst, Computer and Information Systems Managers, Computer Programmers and Software Developer/Applications.[2] Specifically, GE Capital and Gameloft, both recent imports to New Orleans, have obtained H-1B visas for software developers because the local workforce could not provide required resources. To reduce the need for these workers, NOLA Tech Hire Initiative (renamed BootUpNOLA) will train for these occupations with local individuals who need to move into well-paying jobs.
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t the time of this proposal there are 1,235 open IT and software-related jobs in New Orleans[3] and 34 percent of metro area job openings required at least a Bachelor’s degree but only 27 percent of the adult population has attained a degree.[4] A report from the Louisiana Workforce Commission estimates that jobs in the technology sector will grow 27 percent between now and 2022, which translates into 270 jobs per year. This does not include the technology jobs in non-tech sectors that often go unclassified. Jobs with the most four-year growth are: programmers (16%), computer support, (16%), database administration, (19%), and data entry (48%.)[5]
Programming/Coding
Computer Assisted Design
Operation Spark, a 501C-3, teaches coding and programming through various types of “bootcamp”-style and immersion classes and trains non-traditional technology students.
Computer-aided design (CAD) is a computer technology that designs a product and documents the design’s process. CAD may facilitate the manufacturing process by transferring detailed diagrams of a product’s materials, processes, tolerances and dimensions with specific conventions for the product in question. It can be used to produce either two-dimensional or three-dimensional diagrams, which can then when rotated to be viewed from any angle, even from the inside looking out. A special printer or plotter is usually required for printing professional design renderings.
Students work on real-life apps and coding challenges and learn entrepreneurial skills in their cohort by creating an actual business model. Spark is highly regarded and students leave with a strong portfolio of work that can be shown to an employer.
OUR PARNTER L
OUR PARTNERS...COME JOIN THE TEAM!!!
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO BECOME A PARTNER CONTACT BILL SABO, INDUSTRY LEAD FOR TECHNOLOGY CITY OF NEW ORLEANS. WMSABO@NOLA.GOV 504-658-7809