Technology training holds enormous promise for helping people navigate the tectonic forces reshaping the world of work.

1. 02/03/2020, 4:37 PMA guide to workplace bootcamps and trainings — Quartz
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TOOLKIT
A guide to staying
competitive in the
workforce
✦ Member exclusive by Michael J. Coren for Beyond student debt
APPHOTO/JOERGSARBACH
In the modern workforce, learning has become everyone’s job.
In the modern workforce, learning has become everyone’s job.
Workers are increasingly expected to spend time mastering how to
use technology to do their jobs better.

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At the same time, technological skills must be updated faster than
before. Automation and AI are poised to transform or eliminate as
many as 375 million jobs worldwide.
Technology training holds enormous promise for helping people
navigate the tectonic forces reshaping the world of work. But for
many, the idea of going back to school in the current context can be
overwhelming. We’ve assembled some of the best resources to help.
Why is learning new skills so
important?
Picking up new technical skills, like coding and design, has the
potential to help millions of people escape the low-wage trap. No less
than 44% of all US workers aged 18-64 without a college education
find themselves earning just $17,950 per year with little chance of
social mobility.
The Brookings Institution’s seminal report on the 53 million making
up America’s low-wage workforce also illustrates a larger plight
across the industrialized world as low-skill jobs disappear and wages
decline. MIT economist David Autor describes just how we got here,
starting with wage stagnation in the 1970s.
“One of the enduring paradoxes that has accompanied the rise of
wage inequality over the last four decades in industrialized

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economies is the sustained fall in real wages experienced by less-
educated workers,” he writes. One economic force stands out from
the others: “the intersection of technological progress and worker
productivity [known as] occupational change.”
Retraining is not just critical for low-wage workers. Everyone will
need to prepare. The Pew Foundation’s 2017 report on the future of
work offers a diverse perspectives on what lies ahead. You’ll get
plenty of insight—and some uncertainty as well. The World Economic
Forum’s series on the Future of Jobs is another. LinkedIn Learning’s
annual reports dive into the skills and strategies employers are using
to develop and attract talent.
Educational researchers are honest about the limits of our current
efforts to educate workers for the demands of the future. John Pane,
a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation think tank, says we’re just
starting to figure out how to use technology to improve learning. His
2018 white paper on the topic offers a glimpse at how we might make
teach future generations more effectively. MIT’s Poverty Lab has a
wealth of rigorous research on how education can be improved.
The promise is that technology will democratize learning. That was
the hope raised in a 1984 paper called “The Two Sigma
Problem,” published in the journal Education Research. Educational
psychologist Benjamin Bloom reported turning average students into
superior ones through intensive personalized instruction and
mastery learning. While suitable for almost anyone, he wrote, these
two techniques are “too costly for most societies to bear on a large
scale.”

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It’s possible that online tools, artificial intelligence, and virtual
classrooms will make personalized learning possible and affordable
for the first time. We’re not there yet, but new models of education
like bootcamps—short intensive training programs in advanced skills
—on and off-campus are promising experiments.
I’m convinced. Where should I
go to school?
There’s not yet a lot of transparency in education. It’s easier to get an
accurate rating of your local burger joint than credible and
transparent data about how students fare after attending different
universities. To fix that, a number of organizations are delivering the
data by looking at students’ career trajectories after graduation. But
read the fine print. Bootcamps that claim 90% or higher placement
rates may be fudging numbers by only considering how many “active
job seekers” are hired rather than how many are enrolled.
Here’s a review of data sources to help.
US Census’ Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes: Public
universities in the US have not had to report on their students’
incomes. That’s changing. This brand new data set represents the
first time that the public has access to comprehensive student
outcome data. The most granular data only covers Texas, Colorado,
Michigan, Wisconsin, but it’s an early look at what will likely become

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one way to see what students’ tuition dollars are worth.
Course Report: A directory of US coding bootcamps (some of which
can be attended remotely) and reviews, Course Report is one of the
most comprehensive resources for sorting and choosing a bootcamp.
CareerKarma, a student recruiting agency, puts out regular reports
assessing the bootcamp market (2020) as well as the income share
agreement market (2019). Since they work with bootcamps, they are
not the most impartial sources, but the group collects some of the
most detailed data available.
Bootcamp outcome reports: Bootcamps increasingly produce
annual (or periodic) reports assessing how their students fare after
graduation. Since these “outcome” reports are not standardized,
assessing them is tricky. Almost all promise placement rates of 90%
or more. Analysts warn those numbers can be misleading: many
schools only count active “job-seekers” for as long as 180 days rather
than total enrollees. But they are often the best place to start
evaluating schools, especially those audited by third parties. Here are
a few:
Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR): this non-
profit organization releases reports from more than a dozen
bootcamps on their website (in PDF form, but spreadsheets are
coming next year). It plans on raising the standards for third-
party verification.
General Assembly, Lambda School, and Hack Reactor all
publish their own reports, only some of which are verified and up
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to date.
How do I pay for it?
If you don’t want to (or can’t) take out a loan, income share
agreements (ISAs) may make sense. These contracts allow students to
pay for their tuition out of their future salary. Don’t land a job above
the income threshold? You don’t owe anything. Whether they make
more sense than debt, or cash, is a different question. Here are some
resources to start:
Europe and Australia have established ISA programs. In the US,
the Higher Education Loan Program, or HELP, program is one of
several programs available to help manage student debt in the US.
Navigating the bureaucratic thicket is tough. Here’s a guide to
applying directly.
You can contract directly with private ISA firms including the
startup Blair, Align Upstart, Vemo (partners with schools to offer
ISAs on campus), and the non-profit Better Future Forward (for
low-income students at select colleges).
New ISA programs are up and running at the San Diego Workforce
Partnership’s (SDWP) Workforce ISA Fund, the University of
Utah’s Invest in U program, Colorado Mount College’s Fund
Sueños (Dream Fund), and Purdue University’s Back a Boiler.
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The ISA market and contract terms are evolving fast. It pays to read
the fine print and compare all your options.