Tech jobs hold key to New York's future

Students graduating from a job re-training program on Staten Island this week are the embodiment of how New York can sustain its recovery from the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes.

Just take graduate Prince-Michael Lewis, a 25–year-old who, a few months ago, was earning $10 an hour packaging and shipping items for an online retailer. Today, he’s qualified to get a job designing that website himself that pays six times that amount.

The program, run by the College of Staten Island and AT&T, offered 10 young adults from Staten Island the opportunity to receive high tech IT-training, real work experience, mentoring and certification to apply toward a new career. While it’s one small program, it’s part of a much larger and unprecedented partnership taking place between the city and its business community. The goal: making sure New Yorkers are qualified to participate in today’s new job market.

New York emerged from the financial crisis a changed city in many ways – one far less reliant on Wall Street and instead bustling with entrepreneurship and new businesses fueled by increasingly sophisticated technologies.

Over the past several years, New York City’s booming tech sector has created 300,000 tech jobs, providing more than $30 billion in wages.

But to put our economy on solid footing once again, we need more than the creation of better paying jobs. We need workers with the talent and skills to fill them. That’s the challenge that tech companies like AT&T and others face here and across the nation.

In order to accomplish this, we need school systems to teach the skills necessary to participate in the workforce of the future. But even that isn’t enough to bridge the gap. Programs that retrain current workers are critical to filling the 125 million tech jobs (no, that’s not a typo) the economy is creating across the nation.

New Yorkers can take comfort in knowing their city is, as always, ahead of the game. Last year, the de Blasio administration announced a public-private partnership to start providing computer science education to every public school student.

Local companies, universities and foundations are investing significant resources in programs that introduce young people to coding and provide internships and mentorship for young men and women. And post-graduate job training programs like the one we offered at the College of Staten Island will increasingly offer residents like Prince-Michael a better chance at competing for the jobs they really want.

To be sure, we still have a long way to go. But as long as leaders in business, government and academia continue to act on the opportunities and challenges of a new economy, we will keep moving in the right direction.

James Oddo is the borough president of Staten Island. Marissa Shorenstein is the president of AT&T New York.