Just a few years ago, the nonprofit Merit America was seen as a promising on-ramp for workers in the tech industry. They were one of only two sector-based training programs to take part in Google’s Career Certificates Fund, which aimed to get 20K Americans the training they need to work in high-demand tech jobs.
Having now served over 15K learners in the tech space, Merit America is making a pivot—expanding beyond tech to advanced manufacturing. Eventually, they plan to add HR as another career track.
The Big Idea: With layoffs at tech companies and entry-level jobs threatened by automation and AI, Merit America isn’t the only sector-based training program to rethink their tech training. Others, including Year Up United, Project Quest, and Jewish Vocational Service, are doing the same.
In November, Merit America announced a new partnership with Austin Community College and America’s Frontier Fund Foundation to develop a workforce training program in the semiconductor industry. It’s all part of an effort to scale up—in number, geography, and industry. While Merit America will continue to train tech workers, other industries are attracting attention.
“Our focus is on creating economic opportunity for the 53M low-wage working adults in this country,” says Connor Diemand-Yauman, co-founder and co-CEO at Merit America. “That always begins with us looking at what are the highest growth, most economically promising jobs that would be a good fit for our learners? Through this research, the semiconductor space just came up time and time again as one of the most promising high-growth areas.”
“It’s not only a content area that promises meaningful wages and significant growth over the next several years, but also a content area that’s tightly aligned with our country’s national competitiveness and security.”
The Details: The new partnership, dubbed the Opportunity Coalition, will provide people from low-income backgrounds access to Austin Community College’s Advanced Manufacturing Production (AMP) curriculum online. An in-person component at the college will give them the hands-on technical training they need for the job. Merit America will handle recruitment, skill development, and job placement strategies.
The pilot project with Austin Community College, which will start around mid-year, will only be available for those in the area, but the goal is to expand the partnership to other community colleges across the country where semiconductor jobs are expected to skyrocket. This includes states like Arizona, Ohio, New York, and Oregon. If and when this happens, Austin Community College will continue to provide the online and in-person curriculum used by all partners.
A Shift to Manufacturing
The timing of the new partnership is strategic. The CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized $280B for domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S., encourages applicants for funding to include sectoral partnerships, like Merit America. The Trump administration has said it may review and revise aspects of that funding, but it passed Congress with wide bipartisan support. And research shows that sector-based programs, which train job seekers in skills for specific industries, are more effective than general job training programs. Combined with the wraparound supports that many sector-based programs offer, like help with transportation and childcare, many have proven to be successful.
This is the first time Merit America is partnering with a community college. The nonprofit approached Austin Community College last year after hearing about the success of their AMP program.
Since the college started the program about three years ago, they’ve seen consistent interest, with about 100 students completing the program each year. Hundreds more students have completed the more advanced upskilling and capstone programs.
Semiconductor companies are the primary employers that hire out of AMP, says Laura Lucas, director of strategic initiatives at the office of the chancellor at the college. So far, it’s been a big success for students. At a recent completion ceremony, where the college invites recruiters, every single graduate was hired by Tesla.
“For the college, this is an opportunity to broaden the reach of this program to be able to serve more students in getting that entry-level education to get their foot in the door in this industry, which then creates a career pathway with a good trajectory for them,” Lucas says. “At the same time, it gives us the ability to collaborate with other partners regionally and eventually nationally.”
Rethinking Tech Training
For Merit America, scaling up means reaching more learners, but also branching into different industries. Tech hiring has slowed dramatically. After a slew of Big Tech layoffs, job postings for junior tech workers have dried up and more veteran developers are competing for what entry-level work there is.
These shifts have prompted Merit America to make changes already. For example, they recently paused their Java development program because employers wanted more skills than they were able to train people on in a short-term program. Now they are focusing on other jobs in tech, like cybersecurity.
Frieda Molina, director of economic mobility, housing, and communities at the social policy research organization MDRC, says she’s hearing from other sector-based programs focused on tech that it’s getting harder to place people into entry-level jobs. Fresh rounds of layoffs at companies like Meta will only make it harder.
Lay of the Land: “As the bigger corporations lay off folks, now you have these folks entering the market competing for jobs against our participants, who have a very hard time trying to get placed,” says Francisco Martinez, president and CEO of the San Antonio-based program Project QUEST.
For many years, however, Project QUEST has offered multiple career pathways, helping to cushion the impact of the drop in tech jobs. In addition to IT, they also train workers in healthcare and manufacturing.
San Francisco-based job training program Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) has paused its tech training for now, finding that they were unable to keep up with the pace of change as entry-level jobs became automated and workers needed more advanced skills quickly. Kelcie Wong, chief program officer at JVS, says advances in AI and tech companies’ historical hesitancy to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds, especially in a tight labor market, have pushed them to think differently about tech training. Adding cybersecurity training is one route they’re considering.
“We can’t pivot away (from tech) completely,” Wong says. “Tech and 21st century skills are critical across all jobs now. We’re really thinking about what those skills are that we can incorporate into all of our training, so that as they get into the workforce and the skills they need evolve, they have the resilience and the mindset to adapt to new technologies.”
Year Up United, another national sector-based program and the other recipient of the Google Career Certificates Fund, has also found success in transferring tech training to other industries.
“There are a lot of layoffs in the tech industry, but in the financial services industry, there is actually still pretty robust demand, and in some cases increases in demand, for software development,” says Jeremiah Prince, a research and evaluation analyst at Year Up United. “Because we were in that industry, that reduced some of the impact that the downturn would have otherwise had on us.”
Room for Growth
Merit America, too, has been seeing industries like finance, healthcare, and transportation take a growing proportion of its tech grads. But expanding into manufacturing jobs is a bigger pivot. Molina, of MDRC, says it’s wise the organization has partnered with a community college to make the move and continue to grow.
“When folks talk about the sector programs that nonprofits run, one of the criticisms of these programs is that they’re small and that they can’t scale,” Molina says. “But we have an institutional system in this country that offers training—community colleges. There are many of them, and the benefit is that they can serve more students.”
The Robot in the Room: One area for growth in all sector-based programs is incorporating AI skills into the curriculum and keeping up with the rapid changes to the job market that AI is bringing. At a recent MDRC-hosted meeting of nonprofits that run sector-based programs, attendees said they felt more reactive than proactive regarding AI and worried they were training people for jobs that AI would soon eliminate.
Austin Community College’s AMP program does not yet incorporate AI skills into its curriculum. Lucas says the semiconductor jobs they’re training people for don’t yet require it, but that could soon change.
Credential Conundrum: Another challenge for Merit America if their semiconductor program reaches the geographic scale its leaders anticipate, is figuring out how to credential students so they can earn stackable college credits.
At Austin Community College, students who complete the AMP program get eight college credits that could count toward a certificate or degree down the road. If a student in another state takes their courses online and does the in-person training at a different community college, it’ll be up to the local college to decide whether the program will result in credits that count toward another credential.
Diemand-Yauman says the new initiative is a challenge Merit America has been eying for awhile. Just before the pandemic, the group launched an advanced manufacturing training program with an in-person component, but was forced to shut it down. The new semiconductor partnership allows Merit to get back in the game in a big way. He sees the move not as a failure of tech training, but as an opportunity.
“We are pretty agnostic on the content area,” Diemand-Yauman says. “What we care about is whether these are roles that offer good wages, meaningful upward mobility, and are accessible to folks who we serve, namely highly talented, motivated people in the workforce who don’t have a bachelor’s degree.”
Correction: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Merit America has paused its Java development program, not cancelled it.