Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself “what am I doing with my life?” In other words, is the job that you’ve fallen into different than the career that you long for? It can be easy to find yourself in a professional rut and it can be just as hard to break out of it once you’ve found yourself there. So, what can you do to not only find a career that is relevant in the workplace and also earn a great salary? New York City-based nonprofit NPower is elevating those who may be dissatisfied in order to find great high paying jobs in the tech industry.
To find solutions to these problems Npower provides 15 weeks of half day classes combined with a 7 week paid internship (22 weeks in total) in order to accelerate the process of learning fundamental tech skills while gaining the valuable experience needed to break into the field. By partnering with big-name companies such as Cisco, HP, Accenture, JP Morgan and many others, Npower is helping their students to work with some of the best in the industry. And with such recognizable names in the tech world as partners, Npower is only providing these companies with capable employees to meet their demand.
We spoke with the company’s CEO, Bertina Ceccarelli, to see how NPower is helping people get out of their dead-end gigs and get the high paying tech jobs that they deserve. “We launched this work to help solve two problems,” says Ceccarelli. The first problem she explains is “there are way too many young adults and veterans from underserved communities who don’t have access to the kind of training opportunities for tech careers which catapults them into the digital economy.” And second, that “there’s just too narrow a pipeline of entry-level tech talent.” So far, Npower’s service has delivered on its process as they have found out that 80% of all of their students “get placed in some kind of full-time employment.”
At its core, she believes that this service is for those who may have never had the chance to get a higher education or lack the means to get the training or experience necessary to make 180 degrees turn professionally. “This is a program that is geared towards those who are working, underemployed, working minimum wage jobs, or currently unemployed,” says Ceccarelli, “we really want to target the service we provide to those in the US population who need it the most.”
As of right now, NPower is offering courses in New York City, New Jersey, Texas, California, Toronto, Baltimore, and St. Louis but they plan to expand more in the future. As Ceccarelli sees it, the company’s growth is bound to happen as the job landscape changes. “The field is growing,” says Ceccarelli since it is projected that “77% of all jobs by 2020 is going to some sort of technology skills.”
