Coders Behind Bars: The Prisoners Training for Future Tech Jobs
By Sean Fleming
As many as 149 million new technology jobs could be created within the next five years. Anyone with IT skills could soon find themselves even more in demand on the jobs market.
While that could be great news for anyone seeking employment, there will be a challenge filling all the vacancies. So some organizations are turning to an unexpected source of potential employees – prison inmates and convicts.
Meaningful opportunities
Unemployment among former inmates in the US is five times higher than for the general population, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company is involved in Justice Through Code, a project to bring coding qualifications to the convicted from Columbia University’s Center for Justice and The Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School.
Photo courtesy of Engin Akyurt.
Source: World Economic Forum (link opens in a new window)
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
