A Beginner’s Pathway to a Career in Tech: Apprenticeship

This blog post is co-authored by Sharon Hutchins, Vice President and Chief of Operations for Analytics, Data and AI (A2D), and Tracy Stone, Director for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Tech, at Intuit.

When the world needs a more diverse tech talent community, you can’t just cross your fingers and hope it materializes. You’ve got to get creative about providing new ways for all kinds of people to get into the field. Even if they’ve never written a line of code in their lives.

A year ago, Intuit became a founding partner with AnitaB.org and Treehouse to launch a new apprenticeship program called Intuit Career Pathways. The premise was simple: we’d give participants an accelerated Treehouse Tech Degree program in crash-course in software engineering skills, move them into a hands-on apprenticeship as part of an Intuit team, offer them a full-time role with our company, and then provide two more years of ongoing support and mentorship to help them make the most of their new career in tech. To broaden the reach of the program as much as possible, we focused on under-represented groups including Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, women, men, and non-binary people — whether they had tech backgrounds or not.

A year later, we’re thrilled at the results we’ve seen!

All 11 of our pilot program participants successfully completed their Treehouse Full-Stack Tech Degree (while being paid a competitive wage while they learned — another key requirement to make sure our program was truly accessible to all). Empowered with new skills, they entered the apprenticeship phase, where they trained as software engineers with Intuit technologists with our Small Business Self-Employed Group and Consumer Group business segments, as well as our Analytics, AI and Data and Identity 360 teams. Along the way, they were immersed in our culture through Employee Resource Groups, Tech Women @ Intuit, Global Engineering Days, and other Intuit communities and events.

Of those first 11 participants, nine accepted full-time roles at Intuit — eight as software engineers, one as a data analyst. Today, a new class of 43 budding technologists is making their way through the program. We can’t wait to see where they end up!

A long-held commitment to diversity in tech

Intuit has long been known for our commitment to diversity. We set ambitious goals for the representation of women and underrepresented groups in our company. By 2024, we intend to have 37 percent of our technology roles worldwide filled by women, and see 18 percent of our US-based workforce made up of those who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx and Native American, Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian.

After all, a more diverse engineering community (software developers, data analysts, data scientists, ML engineers, etc.) helps us create solutions that reflect the needs and experiences of all kinds of people, while allowing opportunities for everyone to lend their creativity and pursue their ambitions in the tech industry.

We also want to make it easier for people of different life experiences to join the tech industry. We value the knowledge and contributions of those who’ve made software a lifetime ambition — the folks who were coding in kindergarten, dominating their high school STEM classes, taking every computer science class they could fit into their college schedule.

And, we’re equally excited to pave a path to a career in tech who may have followed other pursuits. What can our teams learn from liberal arts majors, schoolteachers, accountants, public sector workers? What kinds of perspectives, insights, and bright ideas can they bring to our organization and our industry?

Altogether, for Intuit this is another key to building a tech community that’s as diverse as the 100 million consumer and small business customers we serve.

Giving beginners an opp to build tech skills, get paid while doing it, and land a job in financial tech

Of course, making a shift like this isn’t easy. It’s not just a matter of having an opportunity to learn technical skills. A mid-career change often means going into debt to pay for classes, trying to balance education with the need to earn a living, leaving a steady job for uncertain future prospects, and struggling to find mentors who can guide you on an often overwhelming journey.

Our apprenticeship program was designed to address these challenges head-on. To ease financial pressures, we provided all the hardware and software participants needed at no charge, tuition-free Treehouse training, and a competitive wage for the hours they spent learning.

Upon successful completion of the program, they knew they’d have both the opportunity to join Intuit full-time, and the support resources to make the most of the opportunity, giving them confidence that their hard work and dedication would pay off. And pay off well — beyond the excitement and satisfaction of a new career in the fast-paced world of technology innovation, the median salary for tech workers is double that of the average private-sector worker.

What our alumni and apprentices have to say…

We were thrilled to see the diverse backgrounds of the participants in our inaugural class. They hailed from all kinds of educational backgrounds and interests — linguistics, animal science, business marketing, math, philosophy, and so on.

What our apprentices have in common is a beginner’s mind. Since no previous education or experience is required, it’s their drive, motivation, determination and incredible grit that has been such an inspiration to us, and the greatest contributor to their success.

Apprenticeship Career Pathways Alumni, Kristen Silva and Tamika Hayes, discuss the program with moderator Shreya Krishnan at Grace Hopper Celebration 2022

Hear firsthand about their pathways to a career in tech:

• Tamika Hayes studied classical civilization in college and had been looking for a way to jumpstart her technical skills to enter the software industry. “When I first learned about Intuit Career Pathways, I was so excited to apply for a number of reasons,” she says. “The first reason is that it was beginner-focused, which was something I hadn’t found in many of the other apprenticeship programs I had researched on my own.” Today, Tamika is a software engineer working on core bookkeeping features for accountants using QuickBooks for their clients.
• Ebony Hargro came to the program with a bachelor’s degree in international studies — and a keen interest in the possibilities of a tech career. “I wanted skills that I could own and carry with me. I feel like there’s always a way for you to make an income if you know how to program and build things,” she says. Having successfully completed her training and apprenticeship, Ebony is now a software engineer in Intuit’s Small Business/Self-Employed Group helping build guided Q&As for QuickBooks.

While Ebony, Tamika, and their classmates settle into their full-time roles at Intuit, a new group of apprentices is well underway.

• Cindee Crosby joined this year’s class of 42 apprentices in August 2022, and will be finishing up in the coming weeks. After seven years as a primary school teacher in the classroom — physical, then virtual — she was ready for a change. The opportunity to join a welcoming community on the same learning journey, while receiving a competitive salary, was especially compelling.

She’s currently apprenticing with a team in Intuit’s Small Business/Self-Employed Group, as a front-end software developer for QuickBooks Checking. “Coming from an education background, helping children grow, develop, and reach their goals, I was worried about how to translate that desire into a business environment so the work would be rewarding. At Intuit, we can see the value of our work for small business owners. We speak to them to understand their needs, and what works for them and what doesn’t. Having those conversations makes me excited to do the work to make their lives easier.”

As the diversity of our Intuit Career Pathways participants shows, truly anyone can become a tech professional if they’re given the opportunity, resources, and support needed to do so. We hope our apprenticeship program can serve as a model for the entire technology industry — a way to make these careers more accessible to all kinds of people to help create a more equitable world.

“This was phenomenal on every level,” Tamika says. “I’m so glad that Intuit created this opportunity.”

Learn more and apply!

You can learn more about Intuit Career Pathways in this article in ZDNet, on the AnitaB.org website, and in this video, and you can apply on the Intuit website. And, check out this page for all things Intuit at AfroTech 2022 (https://intuitatafrotech22.splashthat.com) this week in Austin, TX. and come by Booth #1007!