A new public-private partnership is fast tracking STEM community college grads into IT careers and four-year degrees to help meet an enormous demand for entry-level tech employees in corporate America.  

Competition for workers is so fierce that it’s common for IT workers to be “poached” by other companies, said Leo Goncalves, vice president of Workforce Solutions Group for the University of Phoenix that has teamed up with Woz Enterprise and the U.S. Department of Labor to offer the program. 

“Even with the pandemic, IT jobs remain in demand and there is competition for finding resources,” Goncalves said. “Companies are willing to throw money around for higher salaries. There’s a lot of poaching going around in the space, so companies don’t get a lot of retention out of the folks they hire.”  

The new federally recognized apprenticeship program is designed to address both the intense need for entry level IT employees and to help companies retain those workers. 

“Old fashioned” corporate practices back in play to retain workers

To do that, the corporations involved are “getting back to those older mindsets” like paid apprenticeships, paid university tuition and university credits for the apprenticeship, said Chris Coleman, president of Woz Enterprise, a division of Arizona-based Woz U. 

The hope is that by providing financial incentives and on-site experience, participants will feel a sense of loyalty to the company and stick around, he said. 

Woz Enterprise builds and delivers the customized technology curricula that can result in credits toward a University of Phoenix Bachelor of Science degree in . 

For community college grads, the program offers a direct structured path to a job and a degree, typically at no cost to the student, Coleman said. The community college population fits into Woz U’s mission to make technology careers accessible to people who normally would not have that opportunity.

Infosys first corporate partner

The apprenticeship model launched this spring in Arizona and 10 other states in partnership with Infosys, a global leader in digital, IT, and consulting services. 

Selected candidates completed an eight-week pre-apprenticeship training program in one of seven technology tracks to gain essential day-one skills to start a career with one of Woz Enterprise’s recruiting business partners. 

Then as full-time junior associates, individuals participate in a structured online learning program for 12 months. During this time, they continue working and earning a salary, which increases as they gain key competencies. Training hours can be applied for college credit toward an IT degree at University of Phoenix. 

“We have all heard about the tech talent gap,” Coleman said. “Hundreds of companies have been trying to address it, yet here we are in 2020, and the gap remains. This apprenticeship model is the game-changer we have all been looking for.” 

Students and companies wanting to learn more about the program, may visit: . 

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Arizona community colleges, businesses and government agencies have joined a national movement to help those most affected by the massive job losses during the pandemic: low wage workers, women and people of color. 

The effort, called the , is intended to not only to get people back to work but to train them for today’s modern jobs, particularly for technology positions like data and project management, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT architecture, aviation technology, artificial intelligence and more.

“Many in our community are experiencing hardships because they’ve lost their job or a family member has lost theirs,” said Steven R. Gonzales, interim chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District (MCCD), the largest in the nation. “These families are undoubtedly uneasy about what tomorrow will bring. Our colleges understand that these concerns are very real, and are identifying every solution to ease the worry and set up our community to succeed.”

All ten community college districts join to help economies recover

All 10 community college districts in Arizona have joined the national network, which is a 20-state collaboration to help Americans who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic and help local economies recover to their pre-COVID levels.

Widespread business closures due to the pandemic have led to massive job losses in Arizona and across the nation, particularly for those who work in service industries like restaurants, retail and hospitality. 

Hispanic women among those hardest hit in “shecession”

Hispanic women, immigrants, young adults and those with less education were hit hardest by COVID-19 job losses, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center in Washington, D.C.  

According to the National Governors Association (NGA), businesses closed by the COVID-19 pandemic led to 14 million jobs lost in the U.S. According to the Federal Reserve, almost 40 percent of households making less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs in March.

And while a record number of jobs have been added back into the economy — 4.8 million in June and 1.8 million in July — many women are still being left behind because of jobs that cannot be done through telecommuting, according to the .������

College leaders: Now is the time to act

College leaders said they have been putting new programs in place to reskill workers for the digital age. Now, is the time to be even more proactive. 

“We have to help people acquire new skills and get the training necessary to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of the workplace,” Pima Community College Chancellor Lee D. Lambert said. “This is also imperative to help us reach Arizona’s Achieve60AZ goal: that 60 percent of Arizona adults have a postsecondary degree or certificate by the year 2030. We only have 10 years, and for the sake of Arizona’s citizens and the future of our state, we need to reach that target.”

Community colleges expand technology offerings

Over the past several years, colleges across the state have been beefing up their  technology offerings to meet industry demand. Here is a small sampling:

Google IT Support Professional: In June, eight colleges began offering a Google IT Support Professional Support Professional certificate program including Maricopa Community College’s Maricopa Corporate College, Pima Community College and Arizona Western College. The nationally accredited program is for beginners to introduce learners to troubleshooting, customer service, networking, operating systems, system administration and security.��

Artificial Intelligence certificate and degree: In the first collaboration of its kind, Intel is teaming up with the MCCD to launch the nation’s first Intel-designed AI certificate and associate degree program.��

Aviation Technology Program: Pima Community College is undergoing the expansion of its nationally recognized Aviation Technology Program that teaches maintenance and repair training for large transport commercial aircraft. A modernization and expansion of the facility that is adjacent to Tucsonadjacent Tucson International Airport is expected to be completed in 2021 or early 2022.

3D Construction Program: Yavapai College announced this year it is launching what is believed to be the nation’s first 3D Construction Program to add to its current construction programs. Students can learn the emerging new technology of 3D printing to construct houses.

Arizona organizations join the reskilling effort��

In Arizona, those joining with the college districts in the effort are the Governor’s Office, Achieve60AZ, Arizona Commerce Authority, Arizona Community College Coordinating Council, Greater Yuma 91ֱ�� Corp., Pinal County Economic and Workforce Development Department, and The Boeing Company.

About the Reskilling and Recovery Network��

The network is a partnership between the NGA’s Center for Best Practices and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) with support from the Lumina and Siemens foundation. 

Through the network, Arizona and other states will:

• Engage employers in partnering with community colleges to train and hire new employees, prioritizing jobs that pay a living wage or more.
• Engage with a collaborative network of like-minded state leaders  to strategize economic and workforce recovery on a regular basis.
• Receive access to tools designed by peers in the field and be paired with experts engaged by the NGA Center and AACC.
• Have access to technical assistance including webinars, facilitated peer-to-peer learning, virtual state site visits and more.

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Hawaiian Airlines celebrated its new IT Center in Tempe with a traditional Hawaiian blessing ceremony Monday.

The 15,000-square-foot facility first opened its doors at the Hayden Ferry Lakeside multi-use development at Tempe Town Lake on July 1, 2019.

The formal Hawaiian blessing of the airline’s first tech-centric office space outside of Honolulu was preceded by words from corporate and local leaders.

‘Ohana’ means family

“This is very much a tradition for us,” said Peter Ingram, president and CEO of Hawaiian Airlines. “One of the things that’s really important for us as we branch out to this new facility is to make sure that all of you that have joined our ohana��know that you are very much a part of the Hawaiian Airlines team.”

Ohana is the Hawaiian word for “family.”

The airline has more than 7,300 employees, about 90 percent of whom work in or around the corporate headquarters in Honolulu, according to Ingram.

Ingram told his Tempe employees he wants them to feel just as comfortable working for Hawaiian Airlines as their counterparts in the Pacific, and “part of that is bringing the tradition of the blessing.”

“I’ve had the pleasure in my going-on-15 years at Hawaiian of being a part of a lot of blessings as we’ve brought in new facilities and new aircraft and started new ventures,” he said.

John Jacobi, senior vice president of information technology (IT) for Hawaiian Airlines, spoke next, remarking about how quickly the office had grown since opening in its current space.

“Now, we’re about 60 strong, so we’ve created ohana of 60 great individuals here,” he said. “And I’ll tell you, every time I come here the energy of this place just gets me fired up, and it’s such a pleasure to be a part of this.”

Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, also in attendance, said Tempe is a city of choice and that he was glad Hawaiian Airlines chose his city.

“You could have picked anywhere to locate,” he said. “ is the No. 1 job creator and industry, not only in this state but in Maricopa County, so having your IT office here for Hawaiian Airlines really does make sense.”

Ingram credited Mitchell and Kevin Sullivan, executive vice president of sales and client services for the Arizona Commerce Authority, for their help opening the new office.

“As the mayor mentioned, you have choices,” Sullivan said. “The location, the amenities and the accessibility to ASU is tremendous.”

The blessing

Keoni Martin from the Hawaiian Airlines community relations team introduced the formal Hawaiian blessing.

“The first thing in the blessing is the chant, and the one thing I want to recognize is the native people of this place in Arizona and say ‘a���dz�’ to the natives and thank you for your hookipa, your hospitality here on this land,” Martin said.

Martin pointed to a large wooden bowl:

“In the koa bowl, we have water, and we all need water to survive; it sustains life,” he said. “We have Hawaiian salt — paakai — and that’s to preserve: To preserve everything about the blessing, to preserve… all of the mana, or the energy that we’re all sharing with each other today.”

Simple, yet elegant

After the blessing, employees and visitors were led into the IT Center itself — a clean, modern, open workspace with panoramic views of Tempe Town Lake and a cafeteria that looks out across the lake at Papago Park and Camelback Mountain beyond it.

Ingram said the proximity of the offices to reminds him of downtown Honolulu, where the buildings overlook the airport (and the airline’s headquarters) and onlookers can see planes taking off before banking out over the ocean.

He said the idea of an IT office in another state has been a topic of conversation, especially because robust tech talent is difficult to come by in Hawaii, where Hawaiian Airlines is already one of the largest private employers.

“We’ve supplemented that by bringing in a lot of contractors through third-party developers and different service providers,” he said.

But outside contractors are expensive; talented,��in-house employees are much more valuable to a company looking to completely modernize and integrate its tech platforms. Ingram and his team decided to finally take the plunge.

“We looked at a lot of things, including livability, access to technology talent, places where there might be some people with airline experience,” he said. “And as we stacked up all of those and started to build a relationship with Arizona State University, the Greater Phoenix area really rose to the top of the list.”

Tempe’s proximity to ASU sealed the deal, and Ingram said he “couldn’t be happier.”

‘The high-tech stuff’

Jacobi said the company needed specific technology talent — “some of the high-tech stuff.”

Hawaiian Airlines has been revamping its customer interfaces to create a better user experience and stay competitive with other airlines.

“Most of it’s been around integrations — getting unlike systems to talk to each other,” Jacobi said. “And then, too, our customer touch points: The mobile, the kiosks, the web, and those kinds of things, to improve the guest experience.”

But the company needed “different ponds to fish in,” according to Ingram.

Jacobi said Hawaiian Airlines hired , an Irish-owned multinational professional services company, to help analyze what city would work best for an IT Center in terms of cost of living, skill sets of workers, local government, community, universities and more — and Tempe rose to the top.

“We get some really good technical talent that are employees instead of contractors,” Jacobi said. “Basically, our development arm and our technical kind of skill sets are going to be located here — developers, testers and stuff like that — the people that interface with the business are going to primarily be in Honolulu.”

Hawaiian [Airlines] culture

Ingram said Hawaiian Airlines has “a strong culture and a tightknit sense of ohana.”

“That is something that we’ve recognized over the last couple of years as we expand and grow and add new people to the organization and expand geographically,” he said.

The company went through an exercise last year to seek out some of its best employees who exemplify the airline at its optimal standards. The findings helped determine the company’s key values, Ingram said.

Moving forward, the company will be focused on four ideals: �����������, which means caring; hookipa, which means hospitality; ��ō�첹��, or togetherness and unity; and ���’o������, which is about striving for excellence.

“The four of those, when we do those, and we’re all focused on that as our core values — I think we’ve got an unstoppable team and we can really do great things together,” Ingram said.

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Northern Arizona University was recently awarded a federal grant for its work in cyber-engineering and cybersecurity.

The world today is more intertwined with technology than ever. Financial systems, cloud-based storage, data records and even something as common as email all rely on technology.

As technology becomes more integrated in society, the risk of cyberattacks from external hackers grows. In fact, according to the , cybercrime will cost entities around the world approximately $6 trillion annually by 2021.

In an effort to curb the growth of cyberthreats, NAU is developing cutting-edge solutions.

With a three-year, $6.3 million grant from the United States Air Force, NAU professors Dr. Bertrand Cambou and Dr. Paul Flikemma will examine new hardware technologies to stay one step ahead of today’s — and, more importantly, tomorrow’s — hackers.

“One of the issues here is the hackers are essentially ahead of us,” Cambou said. “They always find new techniques and new ideas to fool existing assets, because at the end of the day, firewall and virus protections will be protecting an asset against a normal attack. Which means a lot of the cybersecurity is programmed to keep listing existing attacks. Which means the Department of Defense and the Air Force are looking at solutions to be ahead of the hacker — to do things that are essentially going to be disrupting the status quo.”

The project started as a pitch to the Air Force four years ago. Cambou and his team presented their cybersecurity solutions, and Air Force officials were fascinated by the idea, investing in a proof of concept. The team spent the following summer in a secure Air Force facility fleshing out ideas.

Cambou’s team is comprised of mathematicians, physicians, electrical engineers, and others. Because of the diverse talent pool on the team and the relatively hands-off structure of the university, the team can advance their ideas quickly, Cambou explained.��

“You have to look at the award we got in that context — we are essentially looking at disruptive methods, we’re looking at post-quantum computing-capable methods,” Cambou said. “When I established the cybersecurity up here at NAU, I wanted NAU to be on the forefront of cybersecurity, not like the 400 programs that offer cybersecurity. The idea was to be one step ahead, and the idea was to be post-quantum computing-protected.”

The team plans to develop new cybersecurity solutions including “unclonable functions,” cryptography, blockchain and key distribution. Cambou mentions that these new methods will help technological infrastructures across industries, including medical, financial and transportation.��

“We are more vulnerable to cyberattacks because it’s not just losing an email or something like that,” Cambou noted. “Now, you are talking about financial transaction, self-driving cars, the power grid, shutting down planes, shutting down hospitals — [we] as a society [are] more and more connected and [are] relying on cloud services… relying on cyber environments.”

Technology is growing, and hacking with it. With new threats to cybersecurity every day, the world has to adapt and develop new solutions to bolster its infrastructure. Thanks to Cambou and his team at NAU, that fortification is already underway.

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Discussions about the economy generally touch upon jobs, wages, capital, and other measurements, but they don’t often recognize “innovation.” Arguably the most important metric in assessing an economy’s growth, innovation helps to assess the ways companies are becoming more efficient in their practices. And last year, it reached its highest mark since 2010.

The official measurement of , multifactor productivity, grew 1 percent last year – the fastest growth rate since 2010. Multifactor productivity measures the growth in output after measuring the effect of capital and labor. In other words, without adding more employees or capital, how are firms increasing output?

Productivity is crucial because it improves Americans’ standard of living under all circumstances. This occurs because as firms increase their profit margins through more efficient methods, they are able to increase employee salaries and/or lower prices. Either way, consumers cash in more money than they would with lower productivity.

Arizona Tech Council president and CEO Steven Zylstra highlighted the reasons why productivity has increased at its highest rate in nine years.

“I would attribute a significant amount of that enhanced productivity to technology,” Zylstra said. “I think all sorts of technologies are being used to streamline making things more productive than they historically could have been. I think that’s just going to increase significantly as we move into an era of AI and machine learning because so much will be able to be done with so little.”

Between 2000 and 2007, the U.S. experienced, on average, a 1.4 percent growth rate in productivity, which is much higher than the 1 percent growth rate last year. However, economic skeptics shouldn’t forecast an economic slowdown. Zylstra points out that this period followed the dot-com boom; because the internet was arguably the greatest technological advancement of all time, comparing the two growth rates isn’t a reasonable assessment.

With the rise of smartphones, robotics, and information technology, Zylstra believes we are well-positioned to ride this productivity wave moving forward. In fact, some of this growth even , which ranks in the top third of US states for innovation.

“Here in Phoenix, we’re in the process of outfitting the most significant chip processing plant on the planet,” he said. “It’s going to produce semiconductors with seven nanometer feature sizes. The amount of capability that we’re able to put in people’s hands is mind-boggling. I think robotics and automation, software and IT, and the massive processing power have been some of the main drivers in enhancing our productivity.”

U.S. productivity is in its best position since 2010, and the economy will react accordingly. With the development of more efficient technologies and practices, everybody wins.

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