Five Questions With: Damian Ewens

Damian Ewens is director of TechHire Rhode Island. / PBN PHOTO/STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS
Damian Ewens is director of TechHire Rhode Island. / PBN PHOTO/STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS

Damian Ewens, director of TechHire Rhode Island, talks about the new initiative in Rhode Island with Providence Business News, and its goal to place 2,000 Rhode Islanders into high-paying information technology jobs over the next five years.

PBN: Tell me about Tech Hire RI and what it does

EWENS:TechHire Rhode Island is a new statewide initiative for delivering in-demand tech talent for Rhode Island employers. We have a goal of placing 2,000 Rhode Islanders into high-paying information technology jobs over the next five years. TechHire RI is a collective action initiative that: (1) is employer-driven, working with employers across industry to build hiring solutions aligned to IT job and training needs; (2) unlocks new talent, expanding the local IT talent pool by hiring for mastery, not pedigree; (3) grows proven education and training solutions, to include new higher education computer science minors/majors and best-in-class bootcamps and hiring onramps; and (4) funds success, such as the Wavemaker Fellowship for repaying tech job candidate student loans, as well as RealJobs RI industry partnerships and CS training offerings.

We’re all in this together. TechHire RI is a collaboration with Governor Raimondo, Rhode Island state agencies, local businesses, educational institutions and other nonprofits including ApprenticeshipRI, LaunchCode, SENEDIA, Tech Collective, URI, and many others. My team is based in Providence and works for Opportunity@Work, a national nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that co-designed and and is co-creating TechHire Rhode Island.

- Advertisement -

PBN: On Wednesday, President Obama announced an expansion of the Tech Hire initiative to make sure more Americans are trained to fill technology jobs – how will that affect Rhode Island?

EWENS: Rhode Island was designated as a White House TechHire community in the summer of 2015. Because of Governor Raimondo’s leadership and consistent support across Commerce RI and the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, Opportunity@Work has positioned TechHire Rhode Island as its national learning lab, a model for its work with the country’s 50 (and growing) TechHire communities. This allows us to build on the great work already happening on the ground more cohesively, and bring in best-in-class coding bootcamps, assessments and partnerships here in Rhode Island, and share our learnings and strategies both in the state and throughout TechHire communities across the country. Additionally, TechHire is focused on putting R.I. companies in the driver seat for shaping this tech talent pipeline – in other words, really seeking out, listening to, and engaging our employers to help grow, strengthen and keep tech talent in the Ocean State.

PBN: Are there a lot of tech and IT jobs that are going unfilled in RI?

EWENS: Yes! If you go to our site techhire.org you’ll see real-time job openings and skill needs for Rhode Island companies. Today there are 1,571 open IT jobs available to Rhode Islanders requiring top skills of SQL, Java and LINUX. Nationally, there are over 700,000 open IT jobs. IT represents 15 percent of all open jobs and it is a sector that is growing fast, and that pays roughly 50 percent above average salaries. Part of our job is to help companies “screen in” job candidates (rather than screen out) by hiring based on ability, not pedigree. If you can do the job, you deserve the job.

PBN: What sort of training programs will be offered here?
EWENS:
Starting on May 9, our partners at LaunchCode and URI are offering CS50x, a free, world-class course which is an in-person version of Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science class offered on the edX platform. It is 14 weeks long and is first come, first served (there is a math and logic assessment to identify candidates likely to succeed). You can register today HERE.
Additionally, we are in the process of bringing leading coding bootcamps like Flatiron’s LEARN platform to Rhode Island. Flatiron is one of the country’s only coding bootcamps that has published an independently verified 99 percent job placement rate for individuals that finish the training.
Tech Collective’s
TechForce initiative
provides customized, industry-led tech training to eligible Rhode Island career seekers.

PBN: What interested you in leading Tech Hire?

EWENS: My career has been focused on building better learning systems to help more people earn a living by being themselves. The Information Technology jobs market is the perfect place to make the biggest impact toward this goal for several reasons. For one, IT jobs represent 15 percent of open jobs, the tech industry is growing fast and tech jobs pay 50 percent above average salaries. Additionally, IT jobs are in all industries and regions and more jobs are becoming “IT jobs” every year. So there is a ton of opportunity. Secondly, there is a growing number of good ways, like the coding bootcamps, to learn IT rapidly and to assess mastery. Along with new financing models we are helping to develop, this increases access to more people. This is important because huge swaths of our communities, especially women and communities of color, are drastically under-represented in technology and they represent big unrealized value and opportunity for our companies. Increasing access to opportunity has been my life’s work and is what TechHire Rhode Island is all about.

No posts to display