When I was in New York City in March, taking a short vacation flight to celebrate my partner’s 40th birthday, I walked through Times Square and other midtown Manhattan neighborhoods and saw several billboards advertising Per Scholas. On its website, the company touts its “unlocking the future and changing the face of the generation,” and further notes that over the past quarter century, Per Scholas has “enabled more than 25,000 Per Scholas graduates to unlock their future through rigorous generational training. “”Dedicated Network Paintings” from donors, funders, and partners. Per Scholas students have painted in spaces such as Internet development, IT support, software engineering and cybersecurity.
In an interview with me conducted via video conference in early April, Brittany Murrey, executive vice president of skills screening responses at Per Scholas, explained that the company is a national nonprofit that focuses on “advancing economic justice and mobility” by offering free technical services. education he described as “[preparing] students for their next assignment and their long-term career in the generation industry. “The courses, he said, are primarily aimed at other people (such as other people with disabilities) who have been “historically underrepresented in the tech sector. “
“There’s a crossover between the development of representation [in tech] and economic equity among those groups,” Murrey said of Per Scholas’ window of service opportunity. “[They] tend to be women, as well as other people of color and others with other intersections that can create barriers to employment in terms of economic justice. “
For Murrey, whose background includes business development, employer engagement, and workforce development, her role at Per Scholas dates back to her graduate studies at USC. That’s where Murrey began to focus on social entrepreneurship and to look for, he says, “another social impact factor that could better support the capitalist structures that we have in this country. “An important component of that, he told me, is collaborating with nonprofits to aid in the careers of others who have traditionally been excluded from accessing such economic mobility. Murrey would end up applying for organizations that help open careers for marginalized and underrepresented groups, which better aligns with his own private cost system. Prior to joining Per Scholas, Murrey worked at the Employment Opportunity Center, a position she described as “located across the country [that] helps the careers of people incarcerated and convicted in the past. “At Per Scholas, his role is conceptually similar: Murrey now leads the employer engagement strategy and its implementation.
When asked what Per Scholas does for people, Murrey said the organization asks prospective scholars to go through a “revolutionary” application procedure to determine which career fields would be the most productive and have compatibility for them. Free education introduced in 22 U. S. citiesMurrey told me that there’s also a distance learning option that “is slowly developing, too. “The flip side, he added, is that Scholas acts as a resource for potential employers to look for skills. “We’ve worked with leading employers to create more varied skill pools,” Murrey said. “We associate our graduates directly with new career opportunities, from industry-leading Fortune 500 corporations to cutting-edge startups. “
Technology, Murrey said, is becoming increasingly “prolific and pervasive in society. “As such, he explained that each and every organization, regardless of their industry, is looking for the most productive tech skills because we live in a technologically dominant era. Virtually everything everyone else does today has some degree of technical component, and Murrey believes this will increase in the long term and therefore makes more sense to “think of generation as a service [rather than] an industry. “or sector. ” In other words, it can be said that human life and generation are inextricably connected, for better or worse. (By the way, this also explains why my politics in this column have become so varied; especially for other people with disabilities, accessibility is lurking everywhere. )
“We believe that [technology] task opportunities are eternal,” Murrey said. “At our more than 20 campuses across the country, other people from all walks of life and backgrounds can access training, earn degrees, earn degrees or certifications, and unlock careers. and generation sectors ranging from healthcare and financial facilities to logistics and even the professional trades. They do it faster than with a four-year degree.
On the latter, Murrey is quick to warn that Per Scholas’ task is based on skills-based recruitment. This means, he said, “looking at a person’s skills, experience, and ability to perform a task and not whether or not they have earned a classic four-year college degree. “
Murrey strongly emphasized Per Scholas’ project to “unleash the potential” of others from underserved communities who face barriers to access when it comes to applying in the tech sector. This work, he added, has the result of strengthening the economy as more other people work. To elaborate on this point, Murrey cited some statistics: Per Scholas graduates, he said, earn 3 times more than they did before the training. In addition, 87% are other people of color and more than 40% identify as others. than women. Two-thirds have a higher school degree or GED.
“We exercise and expand the possibilities of Americans, who are very varied and have all kinds of intersections that create barriers for them in the technology industry,” Murrey said. “Diversity of skills pays dividends. “
He continued, “We’re educating those technologists and lately we’re expanding to more than 20 cities across the country. In reality, we concentrate on the individual, but we also drive individual impact by explaining and highlighting the economic attitude of businesses and businesses.
In terms of employers, Murrey reiterated his past on corporations ranging from Fortune 500 organizations to small start-ups, saying there are “more than 850” corporations that employ Per Scholas. Given this figure, he said it was safe to say that Per Scholas was a “subject matter expert” in this field. The vast majority of corporations looking to rent are looking for the expertise of Per Scholas; Murrey said they don’t have a formal articulated strategy or imperative to “go to market. “Rather, he said, as they raise the logo and tell their story, Scholas occasionally finds that corporations “have found themselves on our doorsteps because they’re interested. ” These potential employers, Murrey continued, recognize the “inherent value” of this channel, as well as the broad formula of help Per Scholas provides to its graduates and alumni.
Looking ahead, Murrey boasted that Per Scholas had reached an important milestone: the company had trained 25,000 more people as technologists. Given the number of communities and families affected by reverberation, Murrey said this is an “extremely significant” number. Murrey and his team are aware of the “volatile” and “ever-changing” nature of the tech industry, which is why the Per Scholas and Curriculum systems are constantly challenged to remain applicable and up-to-date as the industry advances at a quantum pace. velocity. To accomplish this, they interact with partners and alumni to keep things new and engaging for students.
Per Scholas is encouraged by his long-term outlook despite the constant change, as Murrey said, given the way senior leaders are prioritizing technical knowledge, “there’s more and more market for us to work with employers to help them. “right-sizing and improving the capabilities of your existing painting equipment. “
“By providing highly sought-after education systems and generation capabilities, such as cloud, cybersecurity, and knowledge engineering, we are able to give our students, graduates, and alumni a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” Murrey said. “We design these systems in collaboration with industry experts to ensure our graduates have the skills employers are looking for. One of the things we hear a lot is how we make sure that we’re a workforce that employers need. . Per Scholas is transparent about how we manage our curriculum and how we implement our systems across the country for others who don’t have a genuine opportunity to enter this type of career.
To a large extent, Murrey’s work with Per Scholas fits well with the stories I’ve posted here this week. The work that Comcast NBCUniversal and 2Gether-International are doing together is particularly relevant, as Dalila Wilson-Scott and Diego Mariscal are committed to giving others with disabilities more opportunities to succeed as marketers and technology creators. As Wilson-Scott and Mariscal told me, the disability web is packed with abundant resources that businesses can tap into.
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