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The streets of my neighborhood in Boston are lined with cars with Uber and Lyft stickers on their windshields. My neighbors are drivers. They’ve staked their livelihoods on a job that will soon be made obsolete. What happens to my entire neighborhood, and others like it, when those jobs disappear? What happens to our local bodegas and restaurants? What happens to my neighbors’ families, our schools, our communities? Will they be able to stay here, or will they be pushed out by the rising cost of living, as those with automation-resilient careers continue moving in, driving up the cost of housing?
How many other people across the country are facing similar prospects? Can they afford to upskill, spending time and money in college, or are they without recourse, strapped into a sinking ship? What are we doing for them?
When I founded Resilient Coders in 2014, the idea was to train of workers for new careers as software engineers. It worked. It still works today. We’ve connected many people to careers as software engineers, tripling the wages of the average graduate. I’ve recently hired my successor at Resilient Coders and stepped down, to focus my efforts on creating another program with a broader scope. We need pathways that are accessible to a much broader range of skillsets and backgrounds. Too many people are immediately at risk of losing their jobs, today. Wherever the doors to prosperity aren’t wide enough for everybody, we make new ones.
I want to live in a country where labor value can rise along with property value. But we’ll have to build it.
Pa'lante.
David Delmar Sentíes
The Automation Resilience Worker Center will train workers in the skills they’ll need to thrive in the automated versions of their own fields, while investing in leadership development among alumni of the program.
The Center for AI and the Future of Work (CAIFW) published a landmark report on AI readiness. It’s a blueprint, full of recommendations about how to best prepare the workforce for the impact of automation. We propose to put this research into action.
This Concept Brief recommends a pathway to launch. It’s split into three sequential components: Discovery, Strategic Planning, and Pilot. You’ll find more questions here than answers, and that’s by design. We’re operating under the assumption that we don’t yet know how to do this work correctly. We know we’re bringing assumptions to this project that need to be challenged. We also can’t do much without authentic collaboration with workers. We’re committed to building with them rather than for them.
Similarly, you’ll notice that the further you get into our Concept Brief, the hazier the details become. That’s also by design. Our process is sequential. We can’t know what the pilot will be like until we’ve done our strategic planning. And we can’t conduct much of a strategic planning process before we’ve invested in a thorough discovery phase.
I am the founder of Resilient Coders, a first-of-its kind free and stipended coding bootcamp that trains people of color from low-income communities for high growth careers as software engineers, and connects them with full time jobs as such. The average graduate has seen her earnings triple, from about $33,000 to about $100,000. I am also the author of What We Build With Power: The fight for economic justice in tech. Part history book, and part manifesto, it’s an urgent call for organizing shared strategies in order to move toward a more economically inclusive and equitable workforce. It was celebrated by other justice-minded activists, including Former Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick. I founded Techonómica to support the apolitical nonprofit operations of programs like this one; programs that seek to train and empower workers. Techonómica is currently acting as a fiscal sponsor for the Automation Resilience Worker Center while we get off the ground.
We begin with a listening tour with employers and workers across industries, as well as an extensive landscape audit of existing research. Much of this discovery work has already been done by the CIAFW.
At this point, we’re focusing on big picture questions. What are the roles that are vulnerable, and the skills that are in jeopardy of obsolescence? Conversely, what are the roles and the skills that are in demand or may become so? What are the implications for marginalized communities? Many of the nontechnical skills that seem to come up again and again in reports on the influence of automation on the workforce essentially boil down to a worker’s likability to managers and clients. Supposing that most of those managers and clients are White, what does this mean for people of color, and other folx who are subject to harmful biases? Is their employment that much more tenuous than that of their White, cis het male peers? If so, what’s our responsibility to our students? How do we address is programmatically?
We validate or dispel big-picture assumptions. Can people be trained in automation-resilient skills, in a relatively short period of time? Would employers really invest in training workers whose jobs are vulnerable to automation for jobs that are automation-resilient? Why or why not? Can we assume that the biggest companies (Amazon, Walmart, etc) have the resources to conduct their own training, and that our own target employer is probably a mid-sized business, or coalition of mid-sized businesses with similar talent needs?
We conduct a landscape scan. Who are our potential partners? Competitors? What’s been done already, and can we add meaningfully to it?
Discovery ends with the identification of an industry and anchor employers for a pilot. Timeline is 4 - 6 months.
Once we’ve concluded our initial landscape scan, we need to reflect on the work being done, and identify our own role in the ecosystem. We have the benefit of drawing on JFF’s extensive workforce and education expertise here. What’s being done that we can support, emulate, or extend? Where can we complement? What can be done better?
This exploration will sit within three categories:
What’s the best medium for delivery of educational content? Can this be done remotely, or should we be considering alternative solutions in which training can be delivered in person? What would it look like to make wraparound supports available to students who need them, through third-party partnerships? Once we have a clear understanding of what it is we do in-house and what we outsource, we can begin the work of organizational design. Once we know what staffing looks like, we can start building a budget.
We develop our skills matrix development in partnership with employers. What are the skills that are needed? How broadly shared are those talent needs? How will we evaluate proficiency at the end of the program? Is there a way to do so that is both efficient and equitable? Once we know what our skills matrix looks like, we can clear a path for the signing of MOUs with particiating employers. We can develop a curriculum and syllabus.
What’s our responsibility to our students, once they’re on the job? What would it look like to bake into our model intentional leadership development and community development?
Strategic planning ends with a roadmap for the development of the Automation Resilience Worker Center. Timeline is 4 - 6 months.
By now, we will have identified a target industry, selected community partners that participate in the sourcing and continued support of our students while they learn, partnered with at least one anchor employer, developed a curriculum based on the talent needs of the industry, built a program designed to train workers equitably and effectively, and hired a program team. We're ready to run a pilot.
We will be launching our stakeholder convenings soon. If your organization wants to be part of the development of the Automation Resilience Worker Center, please contact me directly at david@delmarsenties.com. It's from this pool of organizations from which we will be selecting the site for our pilot, later this year.