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Unique Morris-Hughes recalled that when she was attending college, she made $100 stretch over a whole month. That shouldn’t be the norm, she said.

“I often wonder, what if I had an opportunity to be paid and also learn at the same time?” said Morris-Hughes, DC’s labor secretary and head of its Department of Employment Services (DOES).

To provide such opportunities beyond the four-year degree model, the district teamed up with a local startup to upskill DC residents in different tech jobs through a $1.2 million investment.

The Capital Workforce Innovation Consortium, developed via DOES’ partnership with the software job training firm BuildWithin, is pulling together different apprenticeship and training programs in the city in one centralized place. The program and its new platform, SkillsNation, aim to connect residents with tech jobs.

There are also incentives for startups: Using money from the federal Department of Labor, DC is offering $10,000 each to five firms that hire city residents as full-time apprentices. The program additionally set aside $200,000 in total for startups looking to pre-train future full-time employees from the apprenticeship. Beyond that, it offers an incentive to cover six months of salaries for 30 recent college graduates hired through a new DC Fellowship Program.

“It’s reaching DC residents, supporting small businesses and startups,” Morris-Hughes told Technical.ly during DC Startup and Tech Week Monday. “Because there is a talent drain that exists.”

SkillsNation, the new site produced through the consortium, houses information about existing programming. For example, there’s a youth apprenticeship for high school students and an out-of-school program for local residents ages 16 to 24 who are not enrolled in secondary or post-secondary education.

Luis Sarno is a recent graduate of this program. The DC native held different jobs after graduating from high school. He was working at Starbucks when the pandemic hit and was at a loss for what to pursue career-wise.

He eventually took part in a coding bootcamp. He had some of the necessary technical skills from that, but didn’t have the experience to get a job in the field.

Sarno later attended a webinar with DOES about different tech training opportunities, and he came across BuildWithin, which houses an apprenticeship program in its own company. He completed a month-long intensive, then a three-month internship and was eventually offered an apprenticeship role at the startup as a software engineer.

He graduated from the program in August and is now a full-time employee. The tech apprenticeship model helped him, and he hopes that the consortium allows others to follow the same route.

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