A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree<br />As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience<br />shows how a worker’s skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references.<br />For companies like IBM, which has 5,000 job openings in the United States, new-collar workers can help it meet its work force needs —<br />and do it inexpensively if those workers are far away from urban centers, where the cost of living and prevailing wages are higher<br />“We desperately need to revive a second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was,”<br />said Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.<br />“That’s what I needed.”<br />Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs.<br />The TechHire program, she said, could be “a doorway to a good-paying job, which is everything here.”<br />Ms. Clark made it through online screening tests and an interview and got into the program.<br />The program’s career coaches also emphasized the so-called soft skills of speaking concisely, working cooperatively<br />and attending industry and professional gatherings to meet people, Mr. Gallegos said.<br />“We’re trying to use the very forces that are disrupting the economy — technology and data — to drive a labor market<br />that helps all Americans,” said Zoë Baird, chief executive of the Markle Foundation.
