Digital Skills For All

Ritu Bahl is the executive director and founder of Computing For All (CFA), a non-profit that enhances computer science education for students of all ages and from all backgrounds. CFA serves as an intermediary of Career Connect Washington. Its Digital Skills For All program creates pathways to career-track jobs in the tech sector. In 2018-19, CFA and its K-8 program, Computing Kids, served over 800 students in after-school classes, summer camps, and workshops. Since 2015, it has organized annual statewide computer science competitions for over 1300 students.

Ritu is passionate about leveling the field for systemically disadvantaged and disconnected youth by equipping them for jobs in the digital economy.  A 25-year industry veteran, she has served in leadership positions in Microsoft, Amazon, Digital Equipment Corporation (now Hewlett-Packard), and Harris Semiconductors. Ritu has B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer engineering and an MBA from the University of Washington. 

Problem: Unskilled workers struggle with stagnating wages and adverse work conditions; at the same time, IT employers encounter local shortages of skilled labor. There are also specific barriers impeding low-income youths, girls, Black youths, Latinx youths, and others who are left behind by tech educational and career opportunities.

Project: Digital Skills For All creates pathways into tech careers that level the playing field. We offer industry-driven and industry-connected classes, as well as career counseling, wraparound support, and networking for students. As part of this, we serve as an intermediary between industry employers, secondary schools, colleges, and youth-serving organizations.

Elevation: Creating these pathways elevates opportunities for all students, but especially those systemically excluded from tech education and employment. Our career-connected approach to training specifically elevates students who can’t commit to education at the expense of immediate employment.

Many youth lack access to tech occupations due to structural barriers. And many job placement programs lack a strategic focus on the industry skills, deeper training, work experience, contact networks, and financial support needed to launch tech careers. The Washington State ESD estimates over 230,000 annual openings for IT-related occupations in 2022-2027. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates software developer jobs will grow 21% between 2018 and 2028 (the average growth across occupations is 5%). Cathy Benko, who studied this problem in her work for Deloitte LLP, stated that "20% of today’s workforce has the skills needed for 60% of the jobs that will be coming online within the next five to ten years." These opportunities should be open to all.

US DOL statistics indicate that women hold 47% of jobs in 2019, but only 25.8% of Computer and Mathematical Occupations. 5% of those women were Asian, and Black and Hispanic women accounted for 3% and 1%. Black and Latino men are also underrepresented.

COVID-19 gives fresh urgency to inequality of tech career access. Our current focus is Washington State; however, underserved populations globally are unable to access the skills, credentials, and networks needed to enter tech occupations.

Digital Skills For All engages employers in digital skills classrooms and curricula, and actively recruits and supports underserved students. We connect with students early in their education and expose them to tech occupations, then nurture them through the process of gaining digital skills, academic and industry credentials, work experience, and networks.

Our flexible, competency-based programs are offered in multiple formats. Every Digital Skills For All curriculum offers real-world projects, some designed and mentored by employers. One two-year program designed for high school classrooms imparts generalized, industry-vetted digital skill sets over the first year. The second year offers role-specific courses in Cyber Security, Cloud Technical, Applications Development, and more. Other programs expose students to tech occupations through job shadows and site visits. These programs give students a clear advantage when pursuing apprenticeships, internships, industry certifications, and college degrees.

We offer extra support to students who would otherwise be unable to focus on education—for example, students under financial pressure to de-prioritize education in favor of immediate employment. We offer stipends to help students treat their classes as their jobs, and build relationships with employers to connect students with paid on-the-job training.

Our Digital Skills For All (DSFA) programs serve youth in and out of school between the ages 16-29 (especially targeting immigrants, girls, and Black and Latinx youth) in Washington State. We partner with youth-serving organizations and case managers who are deeply embedded in the community (listed in the partnership section). We position ourselves in a network of resources for these students, and leverage this network to share resources and case information. These partnerships help us identify and provide the services and wraparound support students need to excel in our rigorous IT training program.

Continuous feedback from students and parents informs and shapes our program; for example, student input has emphasized the power of employer-connected site visits and job shadows. One recent student wrote, “DSFA has changed my life […] By the end of the program I felt like I had an idea of where I’m heading in life and it made me feel like a more functional person in society.” This student was recently offered an entry-level role with an employer partner.

As we scale, we’re also developing a software platform to collect classroom data and tailor learning to student needs through analytics.

We create equitable employment pathways to high-demand, living-wage tech occupations, which elevates opportunities for low-income students, women (who are still dramatically underrepresented in tech), immigrants, and minorities. Our students make employer contacts and connections, which open doors that were previously only available to a privileged subset of youths.

The resulting increased diversity among tech workers will eventually lead to a more diverse tech workforce, which will grow more and more welcoming to currently underrepresented demographics. They'll also create products from diverse points of view, which will better serve all populations.

As a senior manager in the tech industry, I wanted to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace. I always tried to hire women and minority candidates, but found that the majority of qualified candidates came from a narrow segment of the population.

One day, I found myself arguing with 25 other managers about the exact placement of a menu item in a UI, and had an epiphany: this wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life’s work. I wanted to have more impact on the world. This came together with my long-term dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity in our talent pool. I realized that people like me were needed in tech education: people who would nurture and champion women and minorities. This passion led me to found Computing Kids and Computing For All.

As I began this project, I found a multitude of parent-driven computing classes offered at high schools in wealthy areas in my county. However, some high schools in low-income areas offered absolutely no computing classes; others had a single offering. This systemic disconnect between underserved youth and digital skills opportunity became the focus of Digital Skills For All.

In my 25-year career in the tech industry, I entered room after room in which I was the only woman. This didn’t just apply to small gatherings; I remember almost laughing upon realizing I was the only woman among 300 people. The office culture and after-work drinking was male-dominated and toxic to women. Conversations often excluded me by content or structure. And I felt the heavy weight of representing my entire gender (and my race) with every choice in the workplace. 

I want women and minorities to be welcome and included in tech in order to serve workers, but also to serve consumers. When any industry builds products, those products reflect the people who build it. A tech industry dominated by white men will create products that primarily serve white men and boys. This creates obvious holes, like Apple Health’s launch in 2014 that tracked “all of your metrics that you’re most interested in” but failed to include menstruation tracking, one of the oldest and most commonly tracked health metrics in every culture around the world. I want an equitable, inclusive future, and my best possible contribution is a diverse pool of talent ready to shape the tech industry.

Schools alone can’t provide the technical skills, networking, work experience, and employability skills that our target demographics need to launch tech careers. This problem requires industry advocates, support, connections, and outreach.

Our leadership team of three minority women has deep personal knowledge of the challenges faced by workers in tech occupations from underrepresented demographics. Our wide network of contacts helps us find employer partners, and our understanding of the state of the industry helps us create real-world paths into entry-level tech jobs for our students.

In addition, Computing For All has earned a role as program intermediary with Career Connect Washington, which enables us to collaborate more deeply and directly with government and industry.

One recent obstacle came up when we attempted to enter the Registered Apprenticeship (RA) space. We spent a lot of time and resources working on a pre-apprenticeship, and developing structures and relationships for our own RA. However, the more we worked on it, the more I realized that we couldn’t get business commitments for a program that doesn’t yet exist and isn’t funded; at the same time, our state agency strictly requires business commitments ahead of supporting a bid for funding. We couldn’t make it work.

When you’ve committed time, money, and energy to a path, letting go requires a clear-eyed view and objective mindset. It was a serious blow to morale when I recognized that we should stop investing time and money into development of an RA.

Despite this, I was still fully committed to helping youth enter tech, and I was able to repurpose much of the work we’d been doing (the team, employer relationships, curriculum planning, etc.). We’re now moving forward in partnership with Career Connect Washington to create a Career Launch program, and we’re thrilled with the flexibility; graduates will be able to enter the workforce, higher education programs, Registered Apprenticeships, and more.

Leaders are defined by their actions. One big stand I’ve taken as leader of Computing For All, and one I’m committed to upholding despite the financial and logistical challenges, is offering stipends to our students so they can treat learning as their job.

I realized early in our work with high school students that in order to genuinely help low-income students, we need to give them direct support. This isn’t a given; a lot of organizations and leaders consider “extra” digital skills education a luxury, and I’ve been criticized for “paying” students we are providing services to.

However, there’s a lot of pressure on our low-income students that prevents them from focusing on education. Students often need to contribute financially to their home; they work evenings or weekends, help with childcare for siblings, or even leave high school to work full time at low-potential jobs.  In order to truly offer an educational path open to all, we need to give students fuller support in their first steps on a stable career path.

This action and public stance has directly uplifted our most vulnerable students, attracted partners aligned with our core values, and set an example for other local organizations.

Digital Skills For All effectively combines employer-connected learning with a curriculum model driven by data analytics. 

Employer involvement: We seek out companies who are excited to engage with and support underserved youth, and empower them to take concrete action.  Employers directly mentor our students on real-world employer projects within our curriculum; they also offer site visits and job shadows. These kinds of industry-connected learning experiences correlate with better engagement and increased graduation rates. The employer project and mentorship programs integrate with our academic curriculum, impart 21st-century job skills, and build relationships between students and employers.

Data-driven: We have developed a web-based data dashboard to organize and display student progress. Our agile approach began with a simple system, and iterates based on feedback. Our teachers, for example, wanted multiple dashboards to view student progress. The overview dashboard offers a high-level view of student competency across an entire course and all its units. The objective dashboard, on the other hand, gives a detailed status for every objective within a unit. Teachers will be able to emphasize concepts where multiple students are lagging in a group setting, or make personal interventions early when they notice specific students may be falling behind. This will enable us to scale personalized, competency-based learning.

Other dashboards will connect employers with students for internships. Students will fully control all of their academic, project, and work experience data, and will be able to create online resumes and portfolios to showcase their skills and experience.

Career Connect Washington, who selected us as a program intermediary, has extensively researched the power of career-connected learning experiences and provided recommendations and models for success (https://www.wtb.wa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CCT2018_8PgFolio_SimplePrint.pdf). We appreciate their evidence-based guidance, and our partnership with them has led to further strengthening our focus on employer-connected learning.

Our pilot cohort of students responded enthusiastically to the job shadows we arranged, which helped them see futures in occupations they might not have considered. Besides their technical skills, they also report that they’ve “learned to work as part of a team,” learned “confidence and leadership,” and describe being “exposed [...] to a lot of opportunities and experiences.” We’ve also had direct feedback from our students that the stipends help them justify the use of their time to their families.

Our target population best retains and applies learning within a high touch, interactive approach. Our dedicated team offers resources and guidance for wrap-around services. We also provide fresh meals and snacks during the program when we meet in-person, to nourish students and keep them energized. For some, this is the only food they will get that evening. Our students blossom under this care.

We plan to use any support offered by Elevate for our Digital Skills For All (DSFA) programs (ages 16-24), which are just getting off the ground. The goals we discuss below are all related to those programs. However, to indicate our capacity for scaling, I’ll also mention that our elementary and middle school enrichment programs served over 800 students in the 2018-2019 school year, summer included (2019-2020 data collection is still in progress). 

Our pilot DSFA program has served 23 students from summer 2019 to summer 2020. COVID-19 has added challenges to our plans, but we still intend to launch a cohort of 15 high school students in the fall of 2020.

We’re currently developing a software platform to scale throughout the state of Washington, with the huge goal to scale up our Computer and Software Technician Career Launch program from 20 high school students onboarding in Yakima, Washington in Fall 2021 to 200 high school students in the state of Washington in Fall 2022. 

We aim to serve 50-65 students across our DSFA programs for ages 16-24 in 2021, depending on funding. In 2025, we plan to serve 300-500 DSFA students.

We want to impact students’ lives by setting them on the path to living wage occupations. Besides building technical skills, we want to offer more students job shadows, site visits, and direct project work with employer mentors, which give students the confidence to see themselves in these roles. We also want to involve more employers in our programs to help showcase student skills and build students’ social capital.

Our current programs are mostly focused around youth ages 16-20; within 5 years, we hope to expand to re-skilling youths in their mid and late twenties who weren’t given opportunities to begin tech careers as high school or community college students.

We’ve identified the following impact goals for students in a program to run next year:

35% qualified students placed into apprenticeships 
30%  qualified students placed into colleges 
35% qualified students placed into internships or entry level jobs
90%  receive industry certifications
100% students gain 21st century job skills such as teamwork, problem solving, communication and presentation skills.
100% awareness of different kinds of technology jobs

Within the next five years, we hope to track our first cohorts of students through successful entry into IT roles and apprenticeships, as well as matriculation at 2- and 4-year degree programs. Of the 200 high school students entering our Career Launch program in 2022--and the hundreds of students who will enter in 2023 and 2024--we hope to see 90% enter IT career tracks upon graduation.

Our greatest challenge is sustained funding. More funding will help us attract and retain the best talent for teaching, curriculum development, software platform development, and management. We always need computers for students, web hosting, and class materials. And sourcing funds for student stipends is a continuing challenge, though we are grateful to the many sources of the support we’ve received so far.

Another big hurdle is the need to change employer perceptions. Industry in the US isn’t used to thinking of itself as having a role in developing its talent pipeline. However, given the specialized needs of the tech industry, the skills gap, and the lack of diversity among tech graduates (race, gender, economic background, etc.), we believe it’s critical that industry be part of the solution.

While we can provide some supplemental services to students (food in the classrooms, transportation to job shadows, stipends, etc.), we don’t have the capacity or expertise to provide the wraparound services needed by some students. Many of our students are ELL and could use translation services; many belong to low-income families who need other support.

Scaling is another challenge; while we have experience in scaling our Computing Kids program, Digital Skills for all has a different set of needs.

COVID-19 is one last unexpected problem; it’s difficult to provide site visits and job shadows when it’s not safe for students to visit employer campuses in person. It’s also easier for mentors and teachers to provide quality learning in physical classrooms.

A portion of our team is tasked with identifying and applying for new sources of revenue. This includes grants, prizes, state WIOA funding, funding within high school tracks, direct fundraising, industry-funded internships and projects, and more. We’re also working to bring more volunteers into classrooms in order to reduce staffing costs.

To change employer perceptions, we’re finding and activating allies who are aligned with our vision. We’ve had success in locating workers who reached their current roles through non-traditional or non-academic paths. We want to transform these allies into advocates for our programs, and we often ask for their help in pitching our programs within their company and recruiting more potential mentors.

We already partner with many youth-serving organizations who provide wraparound support services. We’re working to deepen these relationships and forge new ones. We are also developing marketing plans to increase our visibility and transparency, which will enable us to secure more services for our students.

To scale our programs, we’re developing a software platform that will track analytics and help us manage classrooms throughout the state, and eventually, globally.

In response to COVID-19, we’ve moved our Spring and Summer programs entirely online, and hosted a virtual presentation by our students at the end of the spring quarter. This enabled us to invite a larger employer audience than usual. We’ll continue to ramp up online services and structures throughout the pandemic. We are monitoring local case counts and reproduction numbers, and plan to reopen safely when we can.

In King County, Washington and the greater Seattle area, we partner with ARC RecTech and local high schools for recruiting and for spaces to hold classes. Local businesses send in guest speakers, arrange worksite tours and employee panels, provide job shadows, offer real-world projects for students to work on, and mentor students with resume and interview workshops. We work with employers including Seattle IT, Bank of America, Microsoft, Facebook, Big Fish Games, SmartSheet, Indigo Slate, Tableau, T-Mobile, Atiz Fashion, F5, Alaska Airlines, Amazon, and Concur. We also have a software development pre-apprenticeship program we’ve been developing in partnership with Apprenti and YearUp Puget Sound.

We partner with a network of youth-serving organizations to recruit underserved youth and minorities, share resources and information, and also to get help with wrap-around support services. This includes JUMA Ventures, Seattle Youth Employment Project, Career Link, WorkSource, and YMCA.

As a Career Connect Washington program intermediary, we’ve partnered with Yakima County’s West Valley High School, which currently runs successful manufacturing partnerships, in order to build an IT Career Launch pathway for their students. Our Computer and Software Technician pathway also involves Yakima Valley College, who is working with us to help get our students stackable academic credentials; Ignite Worldwide, who is helping us specifically recruit and reach girls, particularly girls of color; and local industry partners, who will be providing on the job training hours (Allan Brothers, Triumph Actuation Systems-Yakima, Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic).

The following business model reflects our Digital Skills For All programs for youths ages 16-24, which is the primary initiative we’re hoping Elevate will provide funding for.

Key Resources: Program and teaching staff, secured funding, software portal

Partners + Key Stakeholders: Youth-serving organizations, industry employers, schools, colleges, government agents

Key Activities: Digital skills educational and vocational programs, employer engagement, portal development, grant applications, targeted recruitment, marketing, curriculum development, wraparound service support

Types of Intervention: Digital skills educational and vocational programs, student stipends, intermediary activities between employers, schools, and students

Channels: Computing For All websites and social media, Workforce Development Council, youth-serving organizations, school partnerships

Segments: 

Beneficiary: Youths aged 16-24

Customer: Government agencies, private and corporate foundations, tech occupation employers

Value Proposition: 

Beneficiary Value Proposition: Career pathway to a living wage

Impact Measures:  Number of students served, career and education outcomes for students

Customer Value Proposition: Increasing diversity in tech hiring and product creation, directing and supporting students on paths to high-demand occupations, developing local talent for local jobs

Cost Structure: Staff, student stipends, curriculum development, online platform

Surplus: Expanding to new locations and serving more youths

Revenue: Grants, donations

We are currently funded through a combination of grants and donations, and we hope and expect this funding will continue. Some in-school program costs will be covered by state public school funding. We intend to tap into funding from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Youth-serving organization partners sometimes provide partial funding for programs that serve their youth. We may also license our software platform to other Career Connect Washington intermediaries to help them track student and program analytics.

We are also working to add employer partnerships to supplement, and eventually replace, some other sources of funding: we want employers who hire entry-level tech roles to provide paid on-the-job training for our students, paid projects, recruiting fees, and other support. 

Career Connect Washington awarded a $250,000 grant to develop a Career Preparation IT pre-apprenticeship program, which began in October 2019 and will continue through August 2020.  They have also awarded us a second grant of $220,000 to develop an IT Career Launch program, which funding began in July 2020 and will last 1 year.

The City of Seattle awarded a Technology Matching Fund grant of $39,000 to fund part of our Digital Skills For All pilot program. The funding began in October 2019 and will run through August 2020. We also received $13,700 in funds from the City through an Office of Economic Development grant over the last 12 months (the full grant amount, extending more than 12 months back, was $25,000).

A multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation has provided approximately $20,000 of support over the last 12 months for our work to put together a coalition to create an IT pathway in Seattle high schools. This grant will pay $206,000 over its three-year tenure.

Corporate and individual donors, including the Microsoft Giving Campaign and our founder, Ritu Bahl, have contributed thousands of dollars over the past 12 months to support our programs.

Our Computing Kids K-8 enrichment programs generate revenue—some paid by school districts or partner organizations, some paid by students/parents—but COVID-19 has dramatically reduced the income from these programs since March 2020, and we don’t expect this revenue to recover for some time.

We would deeply appreciate grant funding from Elevate to support our Digital Skills For All program capacity. The $300,000 prize would help us enormously in providing services to a greater number of students. 

We would use this funding to bring our program to new schools and community-based organizations, add additional IT career pathways, engage more wraparound support partnerships for our students, reach out to more employers, and provide more direct monetary stipends to help our students stay focused on their learning. We will also develop the software platform that will serve students in Career Launch programs throughout Washington State.

Computing For All’s entire 2020 budget projects approximately $500,000 in expenses. This covers all of our programs, including Digital Skills For All (the program we want Elevate to fund) and Computing Kids programs. This has been shifting due to the pandemic, and we are currently adjusting our budgets to reflect new realities. 

Digital Skills For All has a 2020 budget of $300,000, including staffing costs (teaching, curriculum development, software development, marketing, and administration), student stipends, office rent, and program supplies (including computers and web hosting for our students to use, and general software and hosting costs). We can provide more detailed financial information upon request, as needed.

We will scale our organization dramatically over the next few years, and we need funding in order to do so. The Elevate prize would allow us to invest carefully and strategically in opening new programs across the state. Curriculum development is always a big initial investment; we’ll need funds to develop several tracks of curricula in addition to our current programs in order to expand. We’re also continuing development of the software platform we need to scale. In order to achieve our vision, we’ll need software tools to manage classrooms, track and analyze student competencies, and connect our students with employers.

We hope Elevate can help market us to potential partners, as well. As we grow, we’ll need to develop further partnerships with other youth-serving organizations. We’ll also need many new employer connections. Persuading employers of the value proposition of active talent development can be a lengthy process. Our current marketing strategy has been fairly successful, but we believe Elevate can help take us to the next level. 

We want to continue to develop partnerships with a large network of employers who hire workers in tech occupations. This includes tech roles within non-tech industries: for example, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and logistics. Employers will engage in a range of partnership activities, including:

• Guest speakers
• Site visits
• Job shadows
• Mentorship programs for individual students and teams
• Real-world projects for teams of students
• Attendance at student presentations
• Internship opportunities

We also want to foster new and deeper connections with youth-serving organizations that can provide wraparound services to our students and their families. This network is critical, as many of our students have needs we aren't equipped to meet. We’d especially like to find partners who can assist our ELL students and who can offer services to low-income students’ families to take some financial pressure off of our students.

We'd also love to strategically increase membership in our advisory board.

We’d specifically like to connect more deeply with the following employers:

Alaska Airlines, Microsoft, Concur, F5, T-Mobile, SalesForce, Facebook, Amazon, Tableau

We want to help these employers create or broaden their high school programs to make them more accessible to underserved youth. We’re looking for engagement anywhere along the spectrum from sending one-time guest speakers to our classrooms, to offering teams of mentors and real-world projects to groups of our students, to interviewing and potentially hiring our students for internships or entry-level roles.