Austin creates a ton of tech jobs and a lot of middle class jobs. So what’s the problem, according to Impact Hub Managing Director Ashley Phillips?
“We don’t match Austinites to those middle class jobs,” she said. “There is a huge pipeline inefficiency.”
Driven by a partnership with Capital Area Workforce Solutions, the City of Austin aims to move 10,000 economically disadvantaged people to middle class jobs by 2021. But how would they do that.
Enter the Impact Hub Workforce Development Accelerator. The accelerator, managed by Impact Hub and sponsored by a host of companies, including Capital City Innovation, Google, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., BuildFax and Digi.City, worked with nine ventures over an eleven week period to address better solutions for job creation as it relates to Austin’s low-income workers.
This was the second cohort put on by the Impact Hub accelerator. The topics were hatched from almost four months of meetings and discovery calls, where Phillips met with business leaders around Austin to figure out what corporations cared about in the city, and what areas they would like to be connected to.
The two biggest topics many of these leaders valued was affordability and workforce development, with diversity and inclusion also valued. Phillips said they used diversity and inclusion as a lens with which they view the other two issues.
The first cohort, created last fall, focused on affordability. Phillips expects another cohort focused on affordability to start this fall, while the second workforce development cohort will begin in the Spring of 2019.
The first workforce development accelerator has already seen positive results. In one year’s time, Phillips calculated that five hundred workers are in training, being trained or placed in jobs due to the work of the cohort.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the cool ventures undertaken by some of these cohort members:
- 3 Day Startup, with over a decade of experience providing worldwide entrepreneurship education, created a program called Next Level. Next Level looks to accelerate the careers of middle-skilled employees through democratizing their entrepreneurship education program. They’ve already adapted a curriculum and created a career canvas. In addition, they’ve partnered with other members of the cohort including, Hernandez Hospitality, Austin Coding Academy and PelotonU.
- #WI is building an ecosystem that connects top talent from diverse ecosystems to some of Austin’s most innovative companies. The team hosted a pilot event with Walmart Technology that created the value of 100 hours of recruiting work in 2 hours. Not only that, but they developed an interesting tool that analyzes the diversity of someone’s LinkedIn professional network.
- KeyUp is an application that helps low-income adults reach middle-class status without a four-year degree. The company already has partnerships with some of the top educational and workforce-oriented Austin-based institutions. One of the companies biggest wins out of the cohort was getting validation of their product, and a clearer sense of what the KeyUp business model might look like. Their goal is to serve 20,000 Austin residents in 2019.
- PelotonU helps adults earn a college degree on time and without debt. As a result of the accelerator, the company was able to have in-depth talks with 8 employers, received interest from the Texas Workforce Commission and found a way to collaborate with almost all of the other cohort members on various projects.
Other organizations in the cohort include MediaTech Ventures Collective, Hernandez Hospitality, Central Texas Allied Health Institute, Austin Coding Academy and Alcye.
