Obama Launches $100m Tech Hiring Drive

The US president Barack Obama announced an initiative on Monday which will bring more high-paying tech jobs to the country.

For that cause, the country will invest approximately $100 million (£66.4 million).

The TechHire initiative aims to train people in skills such as coding, both through traditional means of education (four-year universities and such), and through unconventional education (various training courses and bootcamps).

For that cause, the Obama administration will offer $100 million in funding for training programs for people with barriers to training, such as various disabilities, child care responsibilities, and limited English proficiency.

Over twenty forward-leaning communities are committing to take action – with each other and with national employers – to expand access to tech jobs, the White House said.

The TechHire initiative will achieve its goals by connecting communities together so promising ideas happening in one community can be rapidly adopted by other regions. Today, 21 communities are stepping up and responding to the President’s call-to-action including, among others, New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

The communities will focus on three things in order to make TechHire  a reality: using data and innovative hiring practices to expand openness to non-traditional hiring, expanding models for training that prepare students in months, not years, and using active local leadership to connect people to jobs with hiring on ramp programs.

After the economic breakdown in the past decade, the US is on its way to full recovery. In February 2015, their economy created nearly 300,000 new jobs, and in the past five years,  a total of 12 million new jobs have been created.

The Obama administration is now looking to build on that success.