Acting Locally: Diversifying the IT Workforce

Last week the CompTIA Educational Foundation contributed $100K to the newly formed Year Up Chicago, the local branch of a highly successful workforce development non-profit now in eight cities. As with our grant to the Chicago Academy of Advanced Technology (CAAT) in the spring, this grant is intended to keep the Chicago location moving forward and to challenge other local foundations and corporations to step to the table and support this effort to get people sustainable jobs.

The first Year Up class of 18-24-year-old Chicagoans started their business and IT training seven weeks ago. We spoke to several of them at the ribbon-cutting ceremony last Thursday, and they were all motivated and excited to have the opportunity to learn. There are 22 people in the first class (new classes are added every six months), with half being women and half men and all are African-American. The individuals in this class will start a six-month IT internship with a local business as part of the program at the end of January.

At Year Up, after four months of graduating from the year-long program, 84 percent of the students have a job earning more than $30K or they have enrolled in a higher education program.

Year Up Chicago is working to incorporate CompTIA A+ training into its curriculum, and we'll work with a couple of other Year Up sites on bringing CompTIA A+ to the students. We'll also work with the national Year Up organization on connecting to its 2,000 alumni for training and certification opportunities.

As with many of our partners going forward, we want to support different models for workforce development to understand what works and what doesn't. If we can find some common success factors among the 15-20 partners we'll have in 2011, we can promote those to other non-profits and workforce development groups around the country to make a more efficient difference.

In 2011, we’ll continue our quest to reach more non-profit partners and efficiently deliver training to military personnel and spouses, individuals with disabilities and at-risk youth to help to diversify the IT workforce. Got an idea for a new partner for the Foundation? Give me a shout-out at ceaton@comptia.org.