What is Tech Jobs Academy?
Tech Jobs Academy is an innovative approach to a hard problem: the skills gap. The program is a framework through which talented people acquire in-demand IT skills, enabling them to gain employment with local businesses – including the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft partner companies worldwide – in need of precisely these 21st century skills.
Tech Jobs Academy was created for those who have everything but opportunity. The program aims to expand access to in-demand technical training to unemployed or underemployed adults who are passionate about launching careers in technology. Tech Jobs Academy employs a hybrid learning model that blends hard skills and soft skills, pairing a focus on real-world projects with labs, lecture, and certification exams. Throughout the program, each participant completes roughly 1,000 hours of high-quality skills development.
During Tech Jobs Academy's pilot iteration in New York City, Microsoft collaborated with the Mayor's Tech Talent Pipeline and the New York City College of Technology to deliver Cloud and Server Administration skills to 50 trainees who had been carefully selected from over 500 applicants.
Participants gained deep subject matter expertise and had the opportunity to become Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP), Microsoft Certified Solutions Associates (MCSA), and Microsoft Certified Solutions Experts (MCSE), which have been shown to increase employability and compensation. In addition to the specific IT skills gained, graduates developed strong collaboration skills and technical writing abilities.
Highlights
The TJA playbook can be viewed here: http://techjobsacademy.com/playbook.pdf
- Each cohort of 25 trainees attended classes full-time over the course of four months.
- Of those who began the program, 94% graduated. For context, only 59% of matriculating U.S. college students ultimately finish.
- Tech Jobs Academy graduates’ new job titles include Cloud Engineer, System Administrator, and IT Specialist; they work at Xerox, the AntiDefamation League, and the City of New York, among others
- Earnings jump over 5x (from $9k to $47k), lifting people out of poverty and into the middle class in a matter of months, not years.
Technical Breakdown
The repo for TJA is hosted on Github at the following link: https://github.com/MicrosoftTCE/tech-jobs-page
TJA is hosted on Github (not Azure) and is a front-end website (HTML, CSS, Javascript) with Mailchimp list integration for signups (available via LastPass).
Local Environment Setup
To make changes locally, clone the repo and access the index.html page from your browser or launch from a local server.
Deployment
To push changes to production, create a new branch and submit a pull request to the gh-pages branch.
Once the pull request has been reviewed, it can be merged and the changes should be available within a minute (depending on Github replication).
Registrar
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