An early passion for coding that turned into a $10M initiative

“At eight years old, my father came home with an Apple II computer. On this now antiquated machine, I wrote my first lines of code and so began a lifelong passion. I believe every child should have this same opportunity.” — Aaron Skonnard, CEO of Pluralsight

Educating our youth is one of the most important actions we can take as a global community, which is one of the reasons we launched Pluralsight One, our commitment to create significant social impact by investing 1% of our time, equity, profit and product to improve access to technology education and support technology-driven solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

We know that equalizing access to technology education creates meaningful economic opportunities. It’s clear there’s a technology skills gap—it starts early and is complex. According to Code.org, in the U.S. alone, only 40% of schools teach computer programming. And while there are currently 500,000 open computing jobs across the country, only 50,000 students graduate with computer science degrees annually.

To help tackle the root of this problem, Pluralsight is joining the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook in the $300M Internet Association initiative. Through Pluralsight One, we’re committing $10M in support of K-12 computer science programs in the U.S., with a particular focus on diversity and access to quality education.

Hear more from Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard about why this initiative is so important and join the conversation on LinkedIn. Learn more at pluralsightone.org.