Covered Wagons and Opportunity in a Tech-Driven Economy
The United States currently faces a large and growing technical skills gap, stubborn income stagnation, and low labor force participation among significant subsets of the population. And there are parallels to a bygone era of comparably vast opportunity in this country.
As an elementary school student in Iowa and Nebraska, I learned about the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed citizens to submit a claim for 160 acres of federal land at no cost. Settlers ventured west over the following decades to stake claims on over 420,000 square miles of territory.
However, the urban poor who had been the focus of the Homestead Act did not benefit from it to the degree Congress had intended. The reason was simple. Most of the urban poor did not possess the primary resource needed to make the trip — a covered wagon! In the end, large portions of territory went to speculators or earlier settlers expanding their holdings.
Fast forward 150 years to our current moment of vast opportunity. Marc Andreessen accurately captured the massive nature of our current moment of opportunity when he said, “Software is eating the world.” This may be true, but ask any executive or manager who has tried to hire software development talent over the last 30 years, and you’ll likely hear the same refrain: The world needs far more software developers and designers.
Just as the nation once had limitless land up for grabs at no cost, there is now limitless opportunity for workers to seize in software. In fact, in an increasingly tech-driven economy, the shortage of skilled technical talent is now suppressing the growth of businesses across sectors and not just in the Silicon Valley and New York City: Every corner of the country needs more software developers and designers.
As in the late 1800s, there are formidable obstacles preventing many able minds from pursuing the expansive “green field” opportunity in tech. In the process of serving thousands of students at Bloc who aspire to new careers in tech, we’ve become familiar with these obstacles. Some of them are based on misinformation about what it takes to succeed in the tech sector. Others are based on tangible constraints, including lack of money, time, and mobility.
- Conventional wisdom tells workers an accredited degree is required, but it’s not. The “qualifications” sections of job postings may suggest otherwise, but skilled talent doesn’t need a computer science degree to enter the profession of software development. In fact, 72% of employers think coding bootcamp grads are “just as prepared” to be high performers as degree holders. Talent-starved companies are more interested in whether a candidate can do the job than in their diploma.
- Attendance in a classroom is a non-starter for many. Most educational/training options on the market today, accredited or otherwise, require physical presence in a classroom several hours each week. But people have busy lives, transportation challenges, child care or parental care responsibilities, and most importantly, jobs that provide immediate income that most people can’t forego. Flexible online training models can help a large part of the population gain access to training that they would otherwise never experience.
- Effective training isn’t cheap, and financing is a tall hurdle. Lower and middle income individuals most in need of financing find this obstacle to be practically insurmountable. Even if credit vehicles, including student loans, weren’t so challenging to navigate, the risk exposure feels massive. If your ratio of future debt-to-current income is too lopsided, a tremendous leap of faith is required to pay upfront to retrain for a new career. Combine these financial anxieties with daunting admissions standards and varied outcomes, and the prospect of costly training feels preposterously out of reach.
- No downside protection to mitigate risk. Even if you earn a degree or complete a training program, there is no certainty you’ll get a job, and those loans aren’t going to pay themselves. The undertaking becomes a high-stakes gamble, as the consequences of unpaid debt can be crushing.
To help individuals retrain for jobs in tech, Bloc is mitigating risk for students in two essential ways. First, we employ a mastery-based approach wherein students must demonstrate mastery before proceeding to more advanced material. This precludes students from coasting through their program without the skills needed to land a job as a web developer, software engineer, or designer. Second, if a student passes their program assessments, conducts a robust job search that meets our criteria, and does not get a job, we will refund their tuition in full.
To help more Americans cross the skills gap and fill the high demand for technical skills, an intense and tightly-focused effort is required to remove the obstacles that continue to hold back our nation’s smart and ambitious strivers. The team at Bloc believes this challenge is worth our sustained enthusiasm, and it has a lot to do with the success of our employed grads. What we’ve discovered is that a part-time online training model with manageable financing options is critical to unlocking access to in-demand skills, greater earning potential, and a better life.
Had someone had the foresight to avail covered wagons to the urban poor back in the mid nineteenth century, we might have unlocked even greater opportunity over the past 150 years. Our nation’s Western states would have been populated by a very different mix of homesteaders with diverse crops, farming and ranching techniques, and limitless ambition. The bottom line is that this lack of foresight was a missed opportunity that impacted American history. Now, as we again face a moment of vast opportunity, there is a chance to put the right tools and conditions into the hands of the people who have the most to gain from this boom.
To wit: today Bloc launched the largest ever coding bootcamp scholarship for women in tech. $1 million!
Clint Schmidt is the CEO of Bloc, an online coding boot camp headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
