ReskillUSA: Connecting Education to Employment

When Codecademy launched in 2011, the public conversation around programming and employment was nascent. Only 200,000 programmers were employed in the US at the time. Critics insisted that there weren’t enough jobs for tech-savvy employees to fill and that those jobs would remain the only ones that required a programming background. Now, in 2014, it’s clear that the opposite is true. Demand for programmers drastically outpaces supply and every industry, from advertising to medicine, requires technology’s touch.

Without a national education system adaptive enough to keep pace with the demands of today’s workforce, new educators popped up. Codecademy, which launched to help me learn the basics of JavaScript, quickly became the choice programming platform for more than 25 million students around the world. New institutions like Flatiron School and DevBootcamp emerged offline, offering three-month intensive courses to help people in cities learn to program. The movement gained steam as more students earned jobs with the coding skills they picked up. Today, technology employers routinely look to hire from these new educational institutions.

But we can do better. Earlier this year, a collection of technology educators came together to discuss the future of the industry. We were, we decided, reaching only a fraction of those we could help – the average victim of underemployment or unemployment likely had no way to know the opportunities that exist for them within technology. At Codecademy, we started ReskillUSA to solve this problem. Working together with phenomenal partners like Flatiron School, DevBootcamp, Sabio.la, Grand Circus, Wyncode, and Thinkful, we’re now making it easy for anyone in America to get started on a path to better employment.

Reskilling isn’t just for recent college graduates struggling to find a job. By working with transitioning urban economies in cities like Detroit and Miami, we believe we can help to create a pipeline of talent to sustain the vibrancy of American innovation and shared prosperity.

We can’t, however, fix the problem alone. As education providers, we hope that forward-looking employers will join us in connecting new educational opportunities with the jobs of today and tomorrow. By joining #ReskillUSA and gaining access to our deep pools of talent, employers will pledge to interview candidates from nontraditional educational backgrounds – helping to fill their open roles while diversifying their workforces.

We encourage everyone – students learning for the jobs of the future or employers interested in hiring a diverse and skilled workforce – to join us. The future of our economy depends on it. Together, we can #ReskillUSA.