Per Scholas trains people in underserved communities who want tech jobs.
When I was in New York City in March, flying there for a short vacation to celebrate my partner’s 40th birthday, I remember walking around Times Square and other parts of Midtown Manhattan and seeing several billboards for Per Scholas. On its website, the company boasts its work as “unlocking potential and changing the face of tech,” further noting that for a quarter-century, Per Scholas has “empowered more than 25,000 Per Scholas graduates to unlock their potential through rigorous training for tech careers” by way of its “dedicated network” of donors, funders, and partners. Per Scholas alumni have worked in areas such as web development, IT support, software engineering, and cybersecurity.
In an interview with me conducted via videoconference in early April, Per Scholas executive vice president of talent solutions, Brittany Murrey, explained the company is a national nonprofit organization which focuses on “advancing economic equity and mobility” through offering tuition-free technical training that she described as “[preparing] learners for their next job and future career in the tech industry.” The courses, she said, are mainly targeted at individuals (such as disabled people) who have been “historically underrepresented in the technology sector.”
“There is an intersection of increasing representation [in tech] while also improving economic equity among those groups,” Murrey said of Per Scholas’ window of opportunity to serve. “[It] tends to be female or women, as well as people of color and people with other intersections that can create employment barriers when it comes to economic equity.”
For Murrey, whose background includes work in business development, employer engagement, and workforce development, her role at Per Scholas can be traced back to her time in graduate school at USC. It was there Murrey began honing in on social entrepreneurship and trying to discover, she said, “an additional social element of impact that could help to perfect the capitalist structures we have in this country.” A big part of that, she told me, is working with nonprofits in supporting career pathways for people who historically have been excluded from accessing such economic mobility. Murrey eventually would transition to working for organizations which support opening career paths for marginalized and underrepresented groups, which fittingly align with her own personal values system. Prior to joining Per Scholas, Murrey worked at the Center for Employment Opportunities, a place she described as “domestically located all over the country [that] supports the career pathways for people who were incarcerated and have past convictions.” At Per Scholas, her role is conceptually similar, with Murrey now leading the company’s employer engagement strategy and implementation.
When asked what Per Scholas actually does for people, Murrey said the organization asks prospective students to undergo a “rigorous” application process to determine what occupational area(s) may best suit them. The tuition-free training is offered in 22 cities across the United States, with Murrey telling me there also is a remote learning option that is “slowly ramping up” as well. The other side of the proverbial coin, she added, involves Per Scholas acting as a resource for prospective employers from which to scout talent. “We’ve partnered with leading employers to build more diverse talent pools,” Murrey said. “We directly connect our graduates to new career opportunities anywhere from Fortune 500 industry-leading corporations to innovative startups.”
Technology, Murrey said, is becoming evermore “prolific and ubiquitous in society.” As such, she explained every organization, regardless of industry, is always on the prowl for top tech talent because we live amidst such a technologically dominant era. Practically everything people do nowadays involves a technical component to some degree, with Murrey saying that is bound to accelerate in the future so it makes more sense to “view technology as a function [instead of] an industry or sector.” In other words, human life and technology arguably are inextricably tied—for better or for worse. (As an aside, this also is a great explainer for why my coverage in this column has become so varied; especially for disabled people, accessibility lies in wait everywhere.)
“We see the opportunity for [tech] jobs is everlasting,” Murrey said. “At our 20+ campuses nationwide, people from all walks of life and backgrounds are able to access training, graduate, obtain credentials, or certifications and launch tech careers and industries that span from healthcare and financial services to logistics and even skilled trades. They’re able to do this more quickly than with a four-year degree.”
On the last point, Murrey quickly caveated Per Scholas’ work is based upon skills-based hiring. This means, she said, “looking at the skills experience and capacity of a person to do a job and not so much whether or not they’ve attained a traditional four-year degree from a university.”
Murrey keenly reemphasized the mission of Per Scholas to “unlock the potential” of people from underserved communities who face barriers to entry when it comes to working in tech. This work, she added, has the byproduct of strengthening the economy because more people are in the workforce. To further the point, Murrey cited a few statistics; Per Scholas graduates, she said, earn three times more salary than they earned pre-training. Moreover, 87% are people of color and more than 40% identify as women. Two-thirds have a high school diploma or GED.
“We’re training and growing the skills of individuals that are highly diverse and have all sorts of intersections that create barriers for them in the tech industry,” Murrey said. “Diverse talent drives dividends.”
She continued: “We’re training these technologists and expanding currently across more than 20 cities in the country. We’re really focusing on the individual, but also driving the individual impact explaining and highlighting the economic lens for companies and businesses.”
In terms of employers, Murrey reiterated her earlier statement about companies ranging from Fortune 500 organizations to smaller startups, saying there are “over 850” companies using Per Scholas. Given that number, she said it’s safe to say Per Scholas is a “subject matter expert” in this realm. The vast majority of companies looking to hire seek out Per Scholas’ expertise; Murrey said they don’t have a formal strategy articulated or an imperative to “get out into the market.” Rather, she said by them elevating the brand and telling their story, Per Scholas often finds companies “have found themselves at our front door because they are eager to engage this talent pool and eager to “access this resource of quality tech talent.” These potential employers, Murrey went on to say, recognize the “inherent value” of that pipeline, as well as the extensive support system Per Scholas offers its graduates and alumni.
Looking towards the future, Murrey boasted Per Scholas reached a milestone: the company had trained 25,000 people to be technologists. Considering how many communities and families are impacted in reverberation, Murrey said it’s a “hugely significant” number. That said, Murrey and team are cognizant of how “volatile” and “always changing” nature of the tech industry, so Per Scholas programs and curriculum are constantly challenged to remain relevant and up-to-date as the industry moves at quantum speed. They accomplish this by engaging with partners and alumni to keep things fresh and interesting for students.
Per Scholas is encouraged by its long-term prospects despite the incessant shifts, as Murrey said given how C-suite executives prioritize technical know-how, “there’s increasingly a market for us to work with employers to help rescale and upskill their incumbent workforce.”
“By offering training programs and high demand tech skills such as cloud, cybersecurity, and data engineering, we are able to give our learners, graduates, and alumni a competitive advantage in the market,” Murrey said. “We are designing these programs in collaboration with industry experts to ensure our graduates are equipped with the skills that employers are actually looking for. One of the things we hear a lot is how to make sure we’re training a workforce employers actually have a demand for. Per Scholas nails it on the head with how we approach our curriculum and how we deploy our programs across the country to people who have no real opportunity to access these types of careers.”
In a broad scope Murrey’s job with Per Scholas dovetails well with the stories I’ve posted here this week. The work Comcast NBCUniversal and 2Gether-International are doing together is especially relevant, insofar as Dalila Wilson-Scott and Diego Mariscal both are committed to giving disabled people more opportunity for success as entrepreneurs and as tech workers. As Wilson-Scott and Mariscal both told me, the disability community is rife with plentiful resources for companies to tap into.