The pandemic has radically altered the employment landscape. Most jobs will be very different when regular work resumes and many jobs will not come back at all. In order to induct a large workforce into new roles, effective and rapid training techniques will need to happen across all sectors. A new venture competition aims to find innovative new solutions for training techniques.
The competition, The Future of Work Grand Challenge, was launched by New Profit, a Boston-based nonprofit with a venture philanthropy fund, XPrize, and MIT. It is a $6 million dollar project that will span two years and aims to rapidly train 25,000 displaced workers and put them in living-wage jobs as quickly as possible.
According to the contest criteria, the winning team will develop a strategy to train 500 individuals in 60 days or less at no entry cost, place as many as possible within 60 days, and ensure job retention of at least 90 days. The organizers believe that the initiative will improve higher learning in the US, especially for those who live in places where quality education is hard to come by.
Some already existing models that parallel what the competition is looking for are Boston-based Resilient Coders, which pays students while they learn to code and helps them find permanent jobs, and CodePath, which works with leading tech employers to give students at historically Black colleges the “unwritten insider curricula” on how to succeed in tech companies.
The organizers stress that the goal of the competition is not to train thousands of Americans in tech. Ideal solutions will come from a variety of industries and use different approaches to accomplish a collective goal.
Interested teams must register for the competition by Nov. 20, 2020 and winners will be announced in January 2023. We at The Optimist Daily look forward to seeing what solutions come out of this forward-thinking initiative.
