At the beginning of 2017 there are over 500,000 unfilled tech jobs in the United States. How will applicants learn the required skills to succeed in these jobs? How will employers avoid overlooking qualified candidates? How will applicants from underserved communities gain access to the training they need to compete for these jobs?

Tess Posner (@tessposner) is the managing director of TechHire, an initiative by Opportunity@Work to connect 100,000 people to tech jobs by 2020. In this interview Tess describes the steps TechHire is taking to accomplish this feat and how you can participate. Tess also offers her vision of a well-rounded 21st-century education, balancing ever-evolving technical expertise against an understanding of what it means to be human.

Listen to this interview now:

Further readings Tess recommends include:
– “The World is Open” by Curtis Bonk
– “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
– “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” by Martin Ford
– “Savage Inequalities” by Jonathan Kozol
– “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
– “The Apology” by Plato
– “The Republic” by Plato
– “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith
– “The Federalist Papers” by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

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