What local workforce development strategies actually work?

It’s common knowledge in the tech world that there are more open tech positions than skilled workers to fill them. But what’s being done, locally, to prepare people who need jobs to get them? And importantly, what’s actually working to reduce the barrier to entry for folks who have traditionally been shut out of the sector’s riches?

This November, as part of our editorial calendar, we’re devoting extra coverage to workforce development, or how people are being trained for careers of the future, and today. We’ll discuss opportunities and challenges with training and apprenticeship programs — work that could guide technologists with nontraditional backgrounds into their first software engineering jobs — as well as retraining programs to teach tech companies’ existing employees the new skills they need to advance in their careers.

Yes, this might include looks at how AI is changing (or eliminating) jobs. But we also want to examine strategies that will help reduce stubborn poverty rates, and partnerships between between industry, nonprofits and government that ease access.

A few relevant stories we’ve published in recent months:

• How Delaware is legislating workforce development
• What will Amazon’s second headquarters mean for the DMV tech workforce?
• Soft skills, tech jobs: What Philly can learn from Albuquerque’s anti-poverty push
• Baltimore’s Catalyte launched a platform to help companies change how they add tech talent

Have an idea for a story, or an organization we should look into, or a report we should read, or an expert we should talk to? Let us know:

Find our reporting here once we get rolling. And hey, if you have ideas for editorial topics we should cover in 2020, let us know via that big orange button above, too. Some ideas of ours include Early Employees (as in, how the first few hires shape a startup), Hiring Trends, Gender Diversity in Tech and Ecosystem Development, for instance.

P.S. A followup from last month’s theme announcement: The first three editions of the inaugural RealLIST Engineers has published in Philly, D.C. and Baltimore! Check them out here. We’ll celebrate the honorees — and crown the winners of the 2019 Technical.ly Awards, too — for Philly and D.C. at events in December. Check out more info (and vote) here.

This editorial article is a part of Technical.ly's Workforce Development Month of our editorial calendar.