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SEATTLE — SEPT. 8, 2022 — National nonprofit Reskill Americans is excited to announce open enrollment for its tuition-free software development training program, which starts on Oct. 3, 2022. The seven-month online training is offered to anyone who self-identifies as an underrepresented racial minority, no prior experience required.

Tech industry professionals are working to expand diversity, equity and inclusion through a recently established non-profit organization focused on software development training, coding, and developing a professional community. The goal is to provide a pathway for underrepresented minorities to start a career in tech, regardless if a person is a career switcher, underemployed, or unemployed.

At the end of our inaugural 2021 session, participants created final projects that reflected their newly-acquired skills as well as their incredible persistence, dedication and creativity. Please scroll down to learn about a few of them.

In October 2021, 130 bright, determined, and entrepreneurial participants completed the Reskill Americans inaugural 2021 software development training program. On December 7, we hosted a Final Demo Day as an opportunity for a few of our participants to showcase their projects so that the tech community could learn a bit more about our program and our participant base.

On October 21st, HBO Max, a WarnerMedia company, hosted a Job Fair with Reskill Americans to share details about more than 100 of its open roles ranging from software developers and UX roles to product designers and program managers.

To help participants hone their resumes in preparation for the job search, Teddy Burriss hosted a Town Hall to share tips, best practices, and a few tricks for crafting the best resume when seeking a job in tech or in a career transition.

On September 27th, Teddy Buriss, a LinkedIn Strategist, Trainer and Coach, hosted a Job Fair for our participants about using LinkedIn as a career transition tool. Teddy’s offered tips and insights for ways to leverage LinkedIn to help your job search and career transition and shared some of best practices for building a professional LinkedIn Profile, a relevant LinkedIn Network, and building a professional brand on LinkedIn.

Teddy is a Certified Career Coach, Certified Social Media Strategist, DDI leadership facilitator, Dale Carnegie graduate coach, Sandlers Sales Trained Professional, YouTuber, columnist, keynote speaker and author who teaches creating success in business and career through building relationships and Using LinkedIn as a Business Tool.

Pam discusses the effectiveness of taking some time to think about ways to solve a coding problem before writing the code. Link to the challenge: https://www.codewars.com/kata/5264d2b162488dc400000001/train/javascript

We sat down with Marina Nitze, a former CTO and entrepreneur, to address questions from our participants that are considering freelancing or starting their own businesses. Marina started her career in 2000 with a business as a web developer for celebrity websites, and 13 years later, she was serving as CTO of the U.

At our Town Hall on September 14th, David Fowler, Software Architect at Microsoft, shared insights and advice about how to prepare for a technical interview. David started his career at Microsoft as an intern, and has over 13 years of experience working on developer frameworks and tools.

Review of solution to this problem on LeetCode: https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/

On September 13th, we chatted with Danielle (Dani) Storlie, Senior Director of Design at Procore Technologies, a construction management software company. Dani has worked for more than a decade in software design, including at Sonos and Deloitte Digital, and consulted for early-stage startup and fortune 500 brands while at Deloitte such as Target, Amazon, and FoxSports.

We discuss this problem on leetcode: https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/ We had a suggestion of another interesting code challenge site: https://exercism.org

Pam walks through solutions to this online coding problem: https://www.codewars.com/kata/54ba84be607a92aa900000f1 August 20, 2021

Write a program to generate a maze. The instructions to get started are here: https://reskillamericans.github.io/code-challenges/maze-challenge

Phase III starts August 23 and continues to October 23. We’ll review all the aspects of the program and how you can get the most from your last 2 months of our program.

The Self Assessment survey for Phase III asked about some Computer Science related terms. Many of you have stated that you are not very familiar with them. Yet, many technical interviewers may ask you about these things.

On August 18th, we hosted a Job Fair with SoftwareONE, the global cloud software management and consulting company, which was recruiting for its SoftwareONE Academy, 12-week paid apprenticeship program. Nina Unger, Talent Acquisition Partner at SoftwareONE shared details about the program, the four-step interview process, and links to apply.

Watch this Google provided example interview - and come back here for additional commentary. https://youtu.be/XKu_SEDAykw

As most teams have completed their Phase II work, we are entering a new phase of our program. We will talk about what we hope to accomplish in preparing you for successful job interviews, and scheduling 1:1 assessment meetings for everyone.

As we entered the ninth week of the Project Phase of our program, our 18th Town Hall featured two leaders in software at Sonos, Inc: Andrew Kwatinetz, Director of Software Product, and Eric Patey, Senior Director.

On July 12th, we spoke with Mike Coleman who works for Google Cloud as a developer advocate where he’s focused on helping to inspire people to do amazing things with Google Cloud’s technology.

On Monday June 28th, we invited Tony Wright, CEO, entrepreneur and UI/UX designer to speak at our Town Hall. Tony, CEO of Rescue Time, has a long career as an entrepreneur, founding numerous startups, including through the famed Y-Combinator startup incubator.

Join us for our 15th Town Hall meeting of the 2021 class of Reskill Americans. Join, Mike, Seyi, Juwon for an update on the program so far. We will be also taking questions, feedback and suggestions from participants.

On Monday, June 14th, we hosted our 14th Town Hall with Laurent Pierre, General Manager of Customer Experience, Engineering Support (CXP) for Microsoft Azure. Laurent shared his background, the positions that his department is hiring for, the opportunities for candidates that have nontraditional (non-tech) backgrounds, and advice for how to grow your career in tech.

On Monday, June 7th, as participants started the Project Phase (Phase II) of our program, we hosted our 13th Town Hall with SoftwareONE employees Nina Unger, Talent Acquisition Partner, and Bill Winans, Regional Director.

On Monday, May 24th, as participants started their 11th week of course instruction, we hosted our 12th Town Hall with guest speaker Kedasha Kerr, a Design Systems Engineer at a large insurance company.

On Monday, May 17th, as participants started their tenth week of course instruction, we hosted our 11th Town Hall with guest speaker Dev Nambi, Principal Data Engineer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (@fredhutch).

On Monday, May 10th, as participants started their ninth week of course instruction, we hosted our 10th Town Hall with Eric Johnson, Director of Innovation at Bright Machines, which is an industrial automation start up that’s building the digital infrastructure for modern manufacturing.

On Monday, May 3rd, as participants started their eighth week of course instruction, we hosted our ninth Town Hall with Columbus Steward, a principal software engineer manager at Microsoft who was looking to hire a software developer to join his ten-person team.

On Monday, April 26th, as participants started their seventh week of course instruction, we hosted our eighth Town Hall with two software engineers who work in technology groups at BlackRock, Inc.

On Monday, April 19th as participants started their sixth week of course instruction, we hosted our seventh Town Hall with guest speaker Deborah Russell, from the Workforce Investment Council, a national governmental organization that provides people with job resources to help them enter the workforce.

On Monday, April 12th as nearly 1,000 participants started their fifth week of course instruction, we hosted our sixth Town Hall with guest speaker David Ortiz, CEO and Founder of SimWin Sports, which develops groundbreaking experiences at the intersection of fantasy sports, sports betting, and E-sports.

On Monday, April 5th, we hosted our fifth Town Hall which featured our guest speaker, Nick Curry, Head of Military Initiatives, Technical Apprenticeships, and Diversity Internships at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Try it yourself at: https://reskillamericans.github.io/first-time-dart/lessons/02-variables

Follow along at: https://reskillamericans.github.io/first-time-dart/lessons/01-hello-world

We worked some git examples today. Just in case anyone wants to follow along. Sorry about some of the video quality - I didn’t set speaker view on Zoom to make a larger recording.

On Monday, March 29th, we hosted our weekly fourth Town Hall for participants in our software development training program. Participants just completed their first week of learning about the program and so we dedicated the entire session to taking questions from them.

Demo of a fresh install of VS Code on Windows and use of the Live Server extension to automatically refresh the target web page.

A walk-through of the first assignment lessons and assignments in Introduction to Programming course from week #2.

On Monday, March 22nd, we launched the first week of learning for our software development training program: participants made a decision about which track they would select, and began their journey installing their development environment and completing their first assignments.

This video is not part of our standard curriculum, but is in response to a conversation started in the #projects-feedback-qa channel. I introduce the concept of Test Driven Development as a coding philosophy, and then give a live coding demonstration of putting into practice.

If you want to jump to the point where Jimi’s audio is fixed -click here: 7:43.

We go into more detail on what is involved in the four tracks to help you decide which one you will focus on during the program. You should plan to make your decision by the end of next week (week #2).

If you’ve never built any kind of web page before, the terms HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be a little confusing. In this demo, I show what those three languages do, and how you can use them to create a simple application in a web page.

On Monday, March 15th, we officially launched our software development training program: a week-long orientation where participants were introduced to the details of each track (Front-End, Back-end, Mobile, and User Experience & Design).

On Monday, March 8th, we hosted our very first Town Hall for our inaugural software development training program, with more than 400 participants following the Livestream on YouTube from around the country.

Reskill Americans is launching tuition-free online software development training for historically underrepresented minorities throughout the U.S. Unlike other coding programs, Reskill Americans is solving the problem of access by eliminating typical barriers to entry such as tuition cost, prior software development knowledge, or other educational requirements.

Femi Akinde and Mike Koss met a decade ago at StartPad, a former Seattle co-working space where Koss was director and Akinde was a startup founder. They both eventually moved on, but stayed in close contact.

Ore and I discuss learning to program and the benefits of the Reskill Americans internship, along with other career advice. (Cuts from this video were published on our website). 0:00​ Intro 0:35​ How did you learn to program?