More people than ever desire to get out of a low-paying job, yet resigning to pursue a new career is a dangerous prospect. Pursuit has received $10 million for a promising and possibly self-sustaining new model for teaching new IT employees, in which students only pay when they get a job. The employment market is odd right now: There are a lot of available opportunities, but employees are holding out, demanding fair pay and acceptable working conditions — and many tech jobs won’t even consider an application without a relevant degree.
There are job training programs out there, according to Pursuit creator Jukay Hsu, but they not only cost a lot of money up front, but their assistance also expires after the lessons complete. And, while charity in this field is generous in certain respects, it is just insufficient to address the magnitude of the problem. “Having the expertise is crucial but not sufficient for being employed,” Hsu added. “You can be intelligent, clever, and capable, but structural impediments still exist. You won’t even get an interview if you don’t have a degree.” (And, he added, the interview isn’t going to be much fairer.)
Managers on the hiring side are keen to fill openings but afraid to take a chance on an applicant who lacks a degree or appropriate work experience. However, as Hsu pointed out, entry-level roles are rarely skill-limited; instead, you’ll need someone who is comfortable with the tools and willing to learn on the job. On both sides of the market, risk management is missing: job searchers don’t want to go into debt for training that may or may not lead to employment, and businesses don’t want to take a chance on someone who doesn’t meet their (not necessarily relevant) credentials.
Pursuit is developing a job training paradigm that addresses both of these concerns. On the job seeker side, learners with low or no income can receive free training and support until they land a job paying more than $50,000, at which time they can negotiate payment. This takes the form of four years of payments ranging from 5 to 15% of the new job’s earnings. To be fair, that’s a sizable fee, and there’s something really repulsive about the thought of raising someone up and then chopping a piece of their success. However, the idea is that the worker would make far more at the new employment to begin with, and would still have more after these payments.
As the money is returned to the fund, it will be used to cover the upfront expenditures of the following cohort of students. Other possibilities, such as coding bootcamps, might set you back thousands of dollars simply to get in the door. The opportunity to delay payment is extremely beneficial to someone who is barely able to pay their rent. Pursuit advises and assists employers in developing a skills-based hiring process for a certain number of roles, as well as onboarding and retention practices that address typical reasons of turnover. Pursuit’s A.J. Walton described the three-year post-hiring support as “a vital element of our work that helps organizations hire and keep bright employees who don’t come from normal backgrounds (i.e. have college or advanced degrees, etc.).”
You’re not alone if this seems like one of those “excellent in theory, bad in practice” concepts. “It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Hsu said, referring to the necessity to prove the strategy works before anybody would support it. But he was able to secure $750,000 to begin testing it in 2016, and after a lengthy period of observation, they are pleased to announce that it has been a success on all fronts. “Results took four years to appear. “It’s a three-year cycle from Uber drivers to engineers — if it was three months, they’d already have these talents,” Hsu added. After four years, however, 86 percent of the cohort had a job, earning an average of more than $85,000 – more than twice or triple their previous earnings. Ninety percent of people held their positions after the first year, so it’s not simply a temp agency.
