Issue #2: SMS-Based Learning, Reuben Ogbonna, Mallory Cromer
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Welcome to issue 2 of Workforce Developers, our new newsletter highlighting the journeys of career programs, software engineers and platforms who are building technology to help job seekers access sustainable careers.
During this month’s issue, we profile Arist, an SMS-based virtual learning tool. If you’re trying to figure out how to deliver virtual learning in bite-sized pieces, learn more below. We love that people can learn by using just SMS, avoiding many of the technical barriers that job seekers may face during this crisis.
If we can do anything to help you or your team during this difficult period, please let us know. Stay safe!
Amina + Harris
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Workforce Developer Spotlight #1: Reuben Ogbonna
I'm a career secondary educator. I've worked in low-income public high schools in Atlanta, GA and Brooklyn, NY as a Math/CS Teacher, School Leader, and Instructional Coach for the better part of a decade. After seeing one too many of my most promising students put themselves into precarious financial situations in order to pursue the dream college degree, I began asking the question "should we be approaching higher education differently." I believe that taking on a lifetime's worth of student loan debt shouldn't be a prerequisite for a meaningful and fulfilling career. And it certainly isn't the most direct path to economic mobility. This is why I created the Marcy Lab School.
The Marcy Lab School is a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, NY. We run a 12-month post-secondary program designed to prepare high-achieving young adults from underserved backgrounds for full-time careers in software engineering. We are an alternative to traditional higher education for students who face financial barriers or for those who are simply looking for a unique experience better suited to their interests.
We teach a full stack web development curriculum, spending the first half of our course on programming fundamentals, data structures and algorithms, and the basics of web architecture. During the second half of our program, students learn to build full stack web applications using technologies such as Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, and React.
One tech tool that helps you do your job that most people don’t know about?
We love Airtable over here! Relational data with a super intuitive UI is such an incredible concept! We pair this with Zapier to automate integrations between our favorite apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Trello, etc.). For any internal tools, forms, or trackers, we try to build them all in Airtable + Zapier. Our CRM, our Kanban board, student rosters... even our program application lives in Airtable, saving us a ton of money on subscriptions to other services.
What would you like to automate?
I would love to automate the creation and grading of trivial coding assignments so that we can spend more time providing students with good feedback on the more meaningful open-ended assignments. There are a couple of products on the market but they are prohibitively expensive.
Tabs open on your web browser right now?
Reviewing students' entity-relationship diagrams on draw.io.
Reading a blog post about companies that are still hiring in the midst of this crisis on dev.to.
Filling out this form on Airtable 😉.
How can we support you?
We are always looking to connect with companies who are hiring promising young tech talent. We are also recruiting for our Class of 2021! If you know of any promising recent high school graduates looking for a rigorous but fun pathway into a technical rear, please send them to marcylabschool.org/apply
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Technology Product Spotlight: Ryan Laferty, COO & Co-Founder at Arist (
arist.co
)
We built Arist to make education more accessible and affordable for teams everywhere.
Arist is the first text message learning platform, helping users create text message courses. Each course consists of one well-written 1200 character day that can have an image, case studies, links to articles and videos, and assessment questions. The entire system will track correct answers and completion rates. We've helped leading Fortune 500 companies to improve compliance training, onboarding, sales enablement, and course reinforcement.
Text message courses are incredibly simple and fast to deploy. A single text message course can be created in a day, and launched instantly. Courses are low-cost, require no LMS, and are easily adaptable to new curriculum. The best part? Because 90% of people read a text within 3 minutes of receiving it, courses have completion and satisfaction rates of over 90%.
We believe that everyone, everywhere should have access to educational content that suits their needs. Most learning doesn't work for the creator or the learner - it's expensive to build and deploy, and sees very low completion rates. The ideal learner experience is one with no barriers to learning, responding, or trying something new.
We were one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas in 2019 and 2020 as well as a SXSW Finalist in 2020.
If you know any organizations in need of deploying fast, low-cost training right now that is highly effective, our team is on standby to get new courses up and running. Reach out to us at arist.co or at ryan@arist.co!
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Workforce Developer Spotlight #2: Mallory Cromer
My mission as an educator is to prepare emerging leaders and entrepreneurs. I also want to train a viable workforce and encourage students to follow their passion even if that means not attending college. I provide real-life projects and skills for students to leave my classroom prepared for whatever life throws at them beyond my classroom walls.
I am currently employed at Broadway High School, a public high school in Rockingham County, Virginia. I teach a multitude of courses: sports marketing, fashion marketing, digital and social Media Marketing, and entrepreneurship. I also oversee and advise the school’s DECA chapter.
One tech tool that helps you do your job that most people don’t know about?
Talk Hiring, a brand new program that I used this year. It allows students to complete a phone interview, records it for us to listen to, and breaks down their speech patterns!
Without teaching any interviewing skills, I had them complete an interview. Then I taught important skills they were lacking and had them interview again. The results were amazing to witness!
This program helped my students improve their public speaking skills as well as interview preparation.
What would you like to automate?
The folding and putting away of laundry!
Tabs open on your web browser right now?
Gmail, AmazonSmile, Google Classroom, PowerTeacher Pro
How can we support you?
Support your local career and technical education programs!
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What are we working on?
Harris: Talk Hiring (talkhiring.com) — Realistic mock interviews with instant feedback. Fully automated.
901 mock interviews were conducted by Talk Hiring in the last 30 days. We’re trying as best we can to support workforce programs as they move remote.
Some users don't have cell phones, and some programs would prefer that participants don't use cell phones in class. We've built support for users to make calls to our mock interviewing system via a web browser (mobile or desktop).
Workforce programs have asked if they can filter which question sets are available to participants. We're building exactly that.
Some of our questions really require past work experience to answer well, and we now share with users which ones do require that.
Many of our interview questions were multi-part questions which can be hard to understand. We’ve adjusted those to be single questions.
Amina: What is Bloc?
Building on the response to our Smart COVID-19 Career Guides, Bloc has deployed a new portal design that highlights active employment opportunities and new job filtering options. We are partnering with Thinknum and Revelio Labs, to expand the data within these portals, by incorporating daily insights on companies job postings, job removals and self-reported career change data.
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What We Are Reading
Zoom, the world’s most popular videoconferencing tool has been under hot water for security and privacy issues. Their CEO wrote a strong piece outlining what Zoom is going to do to fix these issues going forward: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/
As 75,000 NYC youth lose their summer internship opportunities throughout the city, we are actively following local advocacy efforts, especially led by organizations like Teens Take Charge.
Larry David is a favorite comedian of Harris’ and he shares his thoughts on how to survive the quarantine: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/style/larry-david-curb-your-enthusiasm-coronavirus-psa.html
The Financial Diaries is a book that explores how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save―and it identifies the true causes of distress and inequality for many working Americans.
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Resources & Innovation Funding Opportunities
Center for Disaster Philanthropy: The CDP COVID-19 Response Fund will focus on supporting nonprofit organizations working directly to respond to the pandemic among the most vulnerable populations in order to help build their capacity for response. These will include social service organizations focused on supporting hourly wage earners, workers in the gig economy, immigrant/New American populations, older adults, people with disabilities and other communities vulnerable to the physical health, mental health and economic impacts of the pandemic.
Robin Hood Foundation: Robin Hood anticipates making grants to 501(c)(3) organizations in New York City that are well-positioned to serve low-income communities. The initial grants, expected to last three months in duration, will average $45,000. The purpose of these grants is to provide resources to support nonprofits that are on the front lines of this work and can move swiftly to serve affected communities.
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How we can support you
Talk Hiring is offering generous free trials to organizations that think that our mock interviewing tool could be helpful. Reach out to us at hello@talkhiring.com if you would like to participate or learn more (demo is here).
Bloc is offering a free Smart Resume Guide with real-time COVID job search tips to training programs and school. If you are interested in a personalized version for your students, take a look at our demo (which is built off of Princeton’s Resume Guide) reach out at info@jointhebloc.com.
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