Career Pathways
The team at Tapjoy speaks with our learners about career opportunities.
In early 2021, we held several listening sessions with alumni. They shared that while our programs were igniting their interest in pursuing tech career paths, they needed more structured support to understand what next steps to take. We began envisioning a “career cohort” model that will connect alumni to opportunities for continued learning - such as technical certifications, community college degrees, coding bootcamps and four-year institutions - and provide more wrap-around support, learning stipends and community-building to help them succeed in these pathways.
I plan on continuing with projects to test my skills and keep pushing them to be better. I also plan on taking an AP Computer science this fall to get a taste of what's to come in college. And from there I'll see what else I can do to prepare myself for the software engineer life. I'd say some things I learned that opened my mind would have to be facial recognition since it's something I never thought about how involved it was in our day-to-day lives. It's honestly crazy, so learning more about it and how it affects people like me was really eye-opening.”
— Summer 2021 Participant
Laney
We connected with Johnnie Williams, the CIS department co-chair at Laney Community College, located just a few blocks from us in Oakland. Over several months of collaboration, we developed a vision for Hack the Hood learners to matriculate into Laney and receive additional industry mentorship, skill building, and peer support while pursuing their Associate's Degrees or certifications. We secured a $50,000 planning grant from the Catalyze Challenge and a $25,000 award from the Westly Foundation that is helping us launch this cohort in the spring of 2022.
ServiceNow
We explored another career pathway by partnering with ServiceNow to launch a free bootcamp and ServiceNow certification program. We successfully provided 20 learners with 8-weeks of ServiceNow training and free access to their certification tests. ServiceNow went above and beyond to support our learners, but we realized that they needed more direct alignment between their class content and the certification. We are committed to exploring right-fit certification pathways and partnerships that align with our educational strategy in 2022.
In addition to laying the foundations for career cohorts, we supported 18 alumni to apply to internships at Moody’s, DocuSign, Firewood Marketing, and ServiceNow. Excitingly, we had two alumni who completed internships with Firewood Marketing receive full-time offers for positions at Firewood’s sister company.
“I think exposure is so pivotal to people like us who do come from under-resourced backgrounds. With exposure comes awareness and I became aware of opportunities I didn't know even existed, but I am now connected to those opportunities and that is such a blessing. Being given the chance to carve out a space for myself in tech is powerful, and it's more powerful to have someone tell me there already is a space for me, and they'll do their best to get me there”
— Ariel Rios, 2021 Firewood Marketing Intern
In the fall, with the support of JP Morgan Chase, we partnered with three goal-aligned Oakland organizations: The Hidden Genius Project, OCCUR, and United Roots, to engage our alumni in a seven week-long paid internship program by offering local small businesses basic web and social media services. This pilot provided the opportunity for alumni to experience firsthand what it was like to be a freelance contractor for a small business.
We provided learners with additional support to develop their professional skills as they participated in the internship program. We collaborated with partners such as Okta, LinkedIn, and Broadgate Search to deliver six workshops reaching almost 50 alumni on topics such as interviewing, resume building, LinkedIn optimization, job search strategies, and how to work with SMB clients on tech projects.