Last week, one of our amazing developers Alicia Waide and I had the opportunity to meet with congressional and White House staffers to discuss the skills gap in the American workforce. We were there along with five other companies as part of a group assembled by Business Leaders United (BLU).
The importance of these meetings was to reinforce with our national leaders that businesses need more support if we are to narrow the widening skills gap in this country, supply opportunities for those with aptitude to enter the digital economy, strengthen our economy to remain competitive on the world stage and help businesses find new and better ways to hire a more productive and diverse workforce.
These are all issues we’ve worked on at Catalyte for 18 years. We know the technology is there to use artificial intelligence to screen applicants, select those with the ability to become great developers, train them in team-based software engineering and then employ them working for our Fortune 1000 clients. The reluctance to this model has often been at the governmental level; not providing the resources for this type of career path and favoring job programs with less impressive results.
Through these meeting and BLU, we hope that legislators will see the potential of skills-based hiring programs, and provide incentives for companies to both adopt them or hire directly from such programs. As Catalyte has shown, this is a proven way to boost economic prospects of people too often overlooked by system that values pedigree over aptitude.
