Building Our Tech Talent for the Future
This post is part of a series created by the California Public Technology Roundtable. Read more about the Roundtable, see a list of all participants, and learn more about our first meeting here.
Our lives and the world around us are changing at unprecedented rates. Whether we dread or embrace the changes happening, we need to face them squarely and prepare for them to make the most of this opportunity. One of the biggest changes we are seeing is the expectation of what it means to be a worker. With the advent of artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomy, deep learning, and data science, many of today’s jobs for human workers will be fundamentally changed or even replaced by automation. Once we understand that, we can work together to prepare all workers to thrive in our emergent economies, rather than to dread the future and to fight against it. This is true for all Californians, and it is essential for the government and civil service to lead the way in this change.
This idea of ensuring we have a civil service trained in modern methods extends to all jobs. Nina Kin’s earlier blog in this series described how the evolution of data science is leading to new job classifications such as data analyst. This type of change should be accelerated across areas of technology (from data science to drone management to programming). We’ve seen this work in retraining oil and gas workers to new jobs in the solar industry. The existing processes to hire people into the state and local civil service are built on job descriptions and tests that address challenges from 20-30 years ago and often include testing for programming languages that are no longer used. We can start re-tooling these positions to include:
- Intentionally creating opportunities for new careers as technology, autonomy, and robotics continue to dramatically change the jobscape in the coming years.
- Better collaboration among government, businesses, and universities to ensure that what’s taught in school leads to government employment opportunities, and that government provides opportunities for hands-on learning while in school through internships, student positions, and collaborative work. The City of Los Angeles’ Data Science Federation is an example of this, as is the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce’s Tech Talent Pipeline.
- This also includes short-form retraining for at-risk workers in fields that are undergoing digital transformation. Certificate programs and boot camps should be accessible, affordable, pervasive, and recognized by government as today’s truck drivers become tomorrow’s drone operators and programmers. Examples of these include Cal Poly’s Coding Bootcamp and UCLA’s Data Science Certificate and Cybersecurity Bootcamp. This means adjusting expectations that a traditional college degree may not be the only way to qualify for entry level jobs.
We need to make government more agile at quickly bringing in people with new skills and re-training our existing workforce and need to:
- Encourage and recognize risk taking by government workers to shift the culture to one of innovation, experimentation, and prototyping.
- Nurture incubators and accelerators inside of local government or in partnership with universities.
- Recruit and hire with an eye for diversity to fix problems of equity that have happened in the past.
- Create partnerships with local brigades from Code for America, that help identify promising and motivate entrepreneurs from the community interested in making a difference.
- Streamline hiring, contracting, and partnerships as emergent tech skills are needed to solve problems today. Make this process more transparent and accessible for all Californians.
By creating community-based training opportunities that are trusted, this allows us to connect to those most in danger of being left out of the new economy. Taking training to where they are — a local location, at the right level of technical knowledge, and with trusted teachers will make all the difference. Each Californian deserves to have the same opportunities to what will be the best paying and fastest-growing jobs of the future. We all deserve to have a government that employs the best that California has to offer.
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