Solution Providers On Obama's TechHire Initiative: Good Start, But Needs To Go Further

President Obama Monday launched an initiative dubbed TechHire with the goal of training Americans for higher-paying jobs in the IT industry.

"TechHire communities are going to help hiring employers link up and find and hire folks based on their actual skills and not just their resume," the president said to an audience at the National League of Cities conference in Washington, according to reports. "It turns out, it doesn't matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are at writing code. If you can do the job, you should get the job."

The White House said there are about 5 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. today and more than 500,000 of those are in the high-tech industry. The program focuses on training Americans in areas such as software development, cybersecurity and others, so they have the skills to go after jobs in these fields.

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The TechHire initiative involves partnerships with more than 300 major employers in the technology industry based in 21 cities across the country. These employers and cities will be involved in programs to train people to give them the skills needed for these open positions. The training programs are backed by $100 million in federal grants.

"There are a lot of positions open. There are more positions than we can possibly fill. It's definitely a huge struggle," said Stephen Monteros, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Sigmanet, an Ontario, Calif.-based solution provider. "I still have a lot of [openings] in cybersecurity, but I can't find the people to hire. It's a fairly easy assumption to make that we could grow about 10 [percent] to 15 percent if I could find the right people to hire.

"It's nice that they recognize the issue," Monteros added. "The next step is to create a process to rectify this. Over time, they have to stick to the process even if it isn't improving right away. Government is always looking for a pill that instantly makes you well, and that can't be done here. It's more of long-term resolve."

"There is a huge requirement for this [initiative]," SigmaNet's Monteros said. "Out of 100 people that you might train for these jobs, you might find five or six that will qualify. The conversion rate tends to be low because it's a difficult discipline. It requires very good mathematical and analytical skills. You either have them or develop them over the course of your career. There is a high degree of failure as opposed to a high degree of success. It's not like people can't learn those things, but given the time frame allowed to those people, it doesn’t generally lead to success."

Another concern that many solution providers share is that the "major employers" in the tech industry are all large companies, but it is small businesses that need the most help in filling vacant spots.

"Small business accounts for 95 percent of all businesses," said Guy Baroan, president of Elmwood Park, N.J.-based MSP Baroan Technologies. "The big companies are not the ones changing the job market; it's the small businesses. If they really want to make a dent … they have to get the small businesses involved. We are always looking for people. We are hiring all the time. It is very difficult to find good, qualified people. People who actually know the technology are hard to find. If people are willing to work hard and learn, there are all sorts of opportunity. Everything around us is driven by technology, so the opportunity is tremendous."

Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, a Westborough, Mass.-based solution provider, said he believes the Obama administration has done a good job of bringing together these partnerships and acknowledging the problem of vacant IT positions. But he also said he wants to see it cover more areas of expertise in IT.

"I think it's a good start, but it's just that, a start," Falcon said. "The initiative is designed to get people already in the U.S. economy into positions in high-tech. It's focusing on positions in the tech community where they are in short supply. My concern is that the focus is too narrow. When we talk about jobs, we can't just talk about high-tech. A lot of jobs in IT require advanced skills, which are in short supply. A six-month training program isn't going necessarily fill many of the jobs in the high-tech industry."

Cumulus Global's Falcon also said it would beneficial to start the initiative earlier in people's lives, including a technology course in high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools

"Strategically, we need to not continue to look at math and science skills, but technology has to be part of the curriculum," he said. "It's not that everyone needs to be taught how to be a programmer and taught code, but everyone out of high school should have some exposure to programming and coding and general concepts of technology. I don’t think kids are graduating with the types of skills they need in those environments. When I was in school they still had home economics, so you couldn’t graduate eighth grade unless you could make spaghetti. It wasn’t so you could be a chef. It's so you could have that sort of understanding. I think you need that same understanding in technology today.

PUBLISHED MARCH 10, 2015