Digital Divide: Start-Up Trains Bronx Youth for 1.4 Mil Tech Jobs

The U.S. Department of Commerce projects that 1.4 million jobs in tech will be available by 2020. One tech start-up in the Bronx is working to give students from low-income communities the resources they need to secure skilled tech jobs.

 

Jermaine Pinckney is a 24 year old senior at Queens College studying graphic design and animation. After he's done attending classes for the day and working a shift at his school's creative services department, he takes a bus and three trains over to Hunt's Point in the Bronx. That's because he's going to the Knowledge House, a start up that offers young people like him a way into  the tech world.

 

"I like code. But if you want a program like that you have to pay for it. Usually about a hundred dollars, and you get a couple of classes and that's it. You don't really learn much. But from here you get everything," said Pinckney.

 

The Knowledge House wants to give young people like Jermaine an opportunity. More than a third of 16 to 24 year olds in the South Bronx don't go to school or work. That means they don't have access to education focused on tech. Manager of Programs at the Knowledge House Tunisia Mitchell says they wanted to give Bronx youth a way into a job market hungry for skilled tech workers.

 

"We saw that the students here or the kids here within the Bronx had tremendous talent, or had the ability to learn skills very quickly, and they were just lounging around or didn't know where to go," said Mitchell.

 

So they come to the knowledge house where co founder Joe Carrano leads classes in anything from how to use google drive to complex coding skills.For him being a mentor is crucial in helping the learning process.

 

"After I actually met a mentor who ran a technology company that I was incubating, who was like 10 years experienced as a developer, my process just like shot up, and I'm like, well now that I've kinda gone through that, I wanna be able to do that for other people," said Carrano.

 

And Jermaine is definitely glad he doesn't have to try to learn on his own.

 

"If you're doing it on your own, you like, might run into things sometimes that you don't know how to solve. But here, you have mentors that went through that, and they can show you their way of doing that," said Pinckney.

 

And now he's been showing other young bronxites his way of doing it. Jermaine was an assistant teacher at the Knowledge House a few days a week over the summer.