Why I started Slate Impact

Slate Impact is a PBC that creates opportunities for historically underrepresented communities through efficient and effective education in technology, design, and entrepreneurship. We focus on rapid, project-based, and collaborative training through apprenticeship programs that align the interests of students and companies to build a new pipeline of untapped talent.

The same thing that led me to a career as an executive in the bootcamp industry is the same thing that inspired me to leave — the impact potential of rapid transformative education on those subject to the opportunity gap. I remain a big advocate for bootcamps and fundamentally believe that the bootcamp industry is a phenomenal first step in reimagining the future of education. The potential of practical project-based learning that we see in bootcamps has been proven, spoken about, studied, etc. but the impact potential of traditional bootcamps is inherently limited by a business model that once again alienates underrepresented communities.

I started Slate Impact to create a solution catered to underrepresented communities and I started it with a few key premises in mind:

1. The future of work will value creative problem-solving skills in design, development, and product
2. The future of education should be project-based, practical, and collaborative to align with the future of work
3. The current pipeline for diverse talent is fundamentally broken

Premise 1: The future of work will value creative problem-solving skills in design, development, and product

The future of work is exciting for many and terrifying for many more. It makes sense, the rise of automation has already displaced millions of jobs with millions more projected and we’ve already seen a shift from traditional jobs to a gig economy as workers are displaced. Despite this automation, we’ve seen one human skillset stay resilient and even thrive: Creativity. I’m not just talking about the creativity required to make a viral TikTok or to build a brand as an Instagram influencer, but also the creativity to innovate in business, design, and technology. I believe that creativity 1. cannot be automated and 2. is the core skill that will drive solutions for our increasingly complex problems.

As we’ve progressed through the information age our problems have become more and more complex warranting increasingly creative solutions. We’ve seen this shift to creative problem-solving in today’s most innovative businesses. Google famously coined “20% time” where employees are free to spend 20% of their work time on anything that they feel will benefit Google (thereby encouraging creativity). More recently, companies have adopted design thinking principles to facilitate innovation. Design thinking principles are well documented and replicable but the creativity that the design process evokes is unique to each individual/team and is critical for solving the most complex problems. Already we’re seeing the power of creative problem-solving in the work that organizations like IDEO and Stanford’s d.school produce and I’m confident that these creative problem-solving skills are going to be at the core of tomorrow’s workforce.

Premise 2: The future of education should be project-based, practical, and collaborative to align with the future of work

This disproportionally large section mirrors my disproportionally large passion for education.

The obvious solution to training creative problem-solving skills is to have our students solve problems (duh!). In reality, however, I believe it takes a much more deliberate and purposeful approach. I believe that these creative problem-solving skills can be effectively taught through a practical, project-based, and collaborative approach that allows students to help each other thrive in the zone of proximal development. Let me illustrate how this is implemented at Slate Impact.

Practical

First and foremost we focus on training skills that companies actually need. Teaching practical skills may seem obvious but we’ve all seen the disconnect between what is taught in traditional academia and what is practiced in industry. More recently covid-19 and the virtualization of our workforce has shined a light on this deep-seated disconnect between degree and understanding. As job requirements have evolved and work has become more dynamic our traditional education has struggled to keep up. Ultimately, we turn to degrees as evidence of a candidate’s employability but if the skills learned don’t match the skills required then degrees become a poor indicator.

At Slate Impact our apprenticeship program enables teaching practical skills by design. When we implement our apprenticeship program we first and foremost look at the skill requirements for the company and tweak our curriculum accordingly. The close contact we have with companies during the work project portion of our program also allows us to make sure that our students are learning the skills that companies actually need. The apprenticeship allows companies to gain confidence in a candidate’s employability by seeing them in action working on real and relevant problems.

Project-Based

The current path for most junior level talent is 1. go to school to learn skills for your field 2. get a job by showcasing your degree (or hopefully your internships) 3. Retrain yourself on the job. Many of you (not including highly specialized fields) can attest to the fact that the majority of the skills you use today were learned on the job throughout your career. This condition indicates an inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the current model of education — we can and should be learning many of these skills prior to entering the workforce. Project-based learning (PBL) isn’t new, it’s been studied and proven to produce a deeper understanding of skills. More importantly, we see the power of PBL every day as our understanding in our respective fields grows through work experience.

At Slate Impact, PBL is at the core of our philosophy. Our students go through an initial 3-month learning program where 20% of their time is spent learning core material through lectures, group activities, quizzes, and videos while the remainder is spent solidifying and building upon their understanding through projects that mimic what they would see in the industry. After their initial learning program, all of our students go through a 6–9 month work project where they work on live assignments for our clients and corporate partners. This project-based approach is deliberate and carefully crafted to manufacture “ah-hah” moments that create a deeper understanding for our students while training them on how to approach dynamic problems that they would face in their careers.

Collaborative

Collaboration and teamwork is the unsung hero of today’s most innovative companies. Good multiplicative collaboration yields profound results not only when ideating and innovating but also when executing. So when we’re thinking about training tomorrow’s workforce it’s natural to emphasize teamwork as a critical skill. The beauty, however, is that training teamwork by implementing PBL in teams rather than in isolation increases the velocity at which students learn by a full order of magnitude. I saw this time and time again through my work in the bootcamp industry — group projects and activities significantly accelerated students’ understanding. This was especially apparent in our most diverse groups; a team approaching the same problem with different world views yields powerfully creative results.

Which takes us to the third and most concrete p̶r̶e̶m̶i̶s̶e̶. The one that directly guides the Slate Impact mission.

P̶r̶e̶m̶i̶s̶e̶ Fact 3: The current pipeline for diverse talent is fundamentally broken

The lack of diversity in the workforce is not a new issue, especially in today’s most innovative companies. It’s been almost 7 years since Google started disclosing diversity statistics causing others to follow suit. In those 7 years, we’ve substantially increased our focus on improving diversity while only modestly improving statistics. There is much work to be done to promote equity, inclusion, and belonging within organizations.

While promoting diversity within organizations, we also need to deal with the broken pipeline for diverse talent. When we look at computer science for example, a 2018 Kapor Center Report shows that just 34% of Black students nationwide attend a high school that offers computer science courses. The same report reveals that just 18% of bachelor’s degrees in computing are earned by women. As Kapor Center reports, the pipeline is “Leaky”. Our institutions consistently fail to create equitable opportunities for women and people of color at every stage of their education. These inequities in our education system deepen the inequities in the traditional hiring process and the result is stagnation in our progress to dismantle systemic oppression.

This broken pipeline guides our mission at Slate impact to create opportunities for underrepresented talent through efficient and effective education. We understand that breaking down some of these deep-seated barriers takes a multi-pronged approach. Fortunately, we’re already seeing amazing efforts to increase access to STEM education for youth as well as phenomenal initiatives to promote diversity in the corporate world. We believe we can accelerate this progress by creating opportunities for young adults through our rapid yet effective education. Over the next 10 years, our goal is to successfully train 10,000 young adults and by doing so we hope to realize our vision of building a more diverse, impactful, and innovative workforce.

I know this journey won’t be easy but worthwhile ventures rarely are. If you want to learn more, offer feedback/advice, or help in building Slate Impact, please reach out to me directly at jay@slateimpact.com. Thanks for taking the time to read my “Why”.