A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree
As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience
shows how a worker’s skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references.
For companies like IBM, which has 5,000 job openings in the United States, new-collar workers can help it meet its work force needs —
and do it inexpensively if those workers are far away from urban centers, where the cost of living and prevailing wages are higher
“We desperately need to revive a second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was,”
said Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“That’s what I needed.”
Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs.
The TechHire program, she said, could be “a doorway to a good-paying job, which is everything here.”
Ms. Clark made it through online screening tests and an interview and got into the program.
The program’s career coaches also emphasized the so-called soft skills of speaking concisely, working cooperatively
and attending industry and professional gatherings to meet people, Mr. Gallegos said.
“We’re trying to use the very forces that are disrupting the economy — technology and data — to drive a labor market
that helps all Americans,” said Zoë Baird, chief executive of the Markle Foundation.