Right on the heels of my quasi-op-ed piece on our president and how a lot of perspective can sure paint a very good (or very bad picture), I found it timely to land on this recent article from TechCrunch.
The article speaks to Obama’s commitment to investment in technology as a means to drive wage increase. You all clearly know my opinions on driving more technology education – so on the surface I’m all for it!
In short:
The White House sees this as an opportunity to boost overall wages, particularly in underserved populations. Obama has announced a plan to fast-track American earnings with a $100 million federal grant-funded technology jobs training initiative called TechHire. This initiative will work with community colleges, universities as well as developer bootcamps and other non-traditional skills training organizations to place Americans in 120,000 open software development, network administration, and cyber security jobs.
The only real issue I see is that the funding seems low. Far be it from me to advocate for more government spending, but $100M is spent as quickly as it is allocated when the government is involved (whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat at the helm in the Oval Office and in Congress). If you want to make this kind of investment, let’s go more directly to the private sector and get some real industry experts (i.e. not the Department of Education) involved. If you took that cash and bankrolled tens if not hundreds of technical skills programs in major metropolitan areas at both corporate leaders (e.g. Cerners of the world) as well as trade programs (e.g. DeVry), you would surely see more immediate lift.
Til Next Time,
Michael