Is the tide turning? Women filled 60% of tech jobs created this year

womenwhocode

November 20, 2013 4:02 PM

Rebecca Grant   Venturebeat


Dec. 4 - 5, 2013
Redwood City, CA Tickets on Sale Now

Could America finally be making progress toward getting more women into the tech industry?

New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests we might be.

Of the 39,000 jobs created in tech this year, women filled 60 percent of them. Tech career Hub Dice found that this is the first time women have represented a majority of new hires in the past decade.

The tech industry undoubtedly has a gender problem, and the topic of women-in-tech topic has been debated for years. Women make up less than one-third of all employees in the tech sector. Only 3 percent of tech startups have women founders, and tech companies employ an average of 12.33 percent female engineers. Women contribute to just 1.2 percent of open source software and 5 percent of patents.

These numbers are dismal, but at last it seems that women are making gains.

Part of the improvement could stem from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who have been vocal about the need for a more women in tech and a corporate environment where they can succeed.

Research has shown the benefits of a diversified workforce, and American women are highly active on the Internet. They make up 70 percent of both Snapchat’s and Pinterest’s user bases, and women are more likely to use Facebook and Twitter than men. Nielsen estimates that women’s spending power in America ranges from $5 trillion to $15 trillion and that they will control two-thirds of consumer wealth over the next decade.

The notion that women don’t like technology or aren’t interested in technology is absurd, and building a tech community with a more equal gender distribution is long overdue.

Yes, getting girls interested in STEM education is critical to achieving this goal, and yes, creating flexible work policies for employees with children is important for keeping women in tech as well. Sexism and sexual harassment need to stop, and women need to support each other.

But all of these efforts are moot if companies aren’t interested in hiring women in the first place.

The BLS numbers don’t differentiate between full- and part-time jobs and “computer system design, and related services” doesn’t mean that these hires are for technical positions. Furthermore, the number of women getting hired didn’t increase this year, but rather the number of men getting hired decreased, so all that really shifted was the ratio.

These numbers don’t mean that the tech industry is emerging from its period of gender stagnation, but I prefer to be an optimist.

Also watch this video for ‘lets get girls in tech’ awesomeness.

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Hackbright Academy puts women coders in their own league

Jessica Floum, Updated 4:21 pm, Wednesday, September 25, 2013    SFGate      

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  Kara Louie (left) and Jennie Ohyoung begin their 10-week engineering fellowship program at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco programming crash course for women only. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
  Kara Louie (left) and Jennie Ohyoung begin their 10-week...
• 
  The fellowship program covers software engineering. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
  The fellowship program covers software engineering.
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  Hackbright Academy students Gosia Migdal (left) and Katie Lefevre get help from instructor Nick Audo as they work on their first day of class. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
  Hackbright Academy students Gosia Migdal (left) and Katie Lefevre...
• 
  Students stretch their hands during a break. After 10 weeks, the course culminates in a career day. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
  Students stretch their hands during a break. After 10 weeks, the...
• 
  The students start off working in pairs, like Ingrid Avendao (left) and Ava St. John. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
  The students start off working in pairs, like Ingrid Avendao...

David Philips had been the nontechnical founder of several startups and wanted to move to the technical side of things. Christian Fernandez had been the senior software developer at Kivera, Ask and Fuzebox before he turned to teaching.

After meeting through a mutual friend, Fernandez started teaching Philips how to program. He later taught him formally in a class of 21 students, just two of whom were women.
"Going through that experience, (I learned) there's this new type of education you can do," Philips said. "You can learn really quickly and change your career. I also noticed the gender gap in the class."
So Philips, 26, and Fernandez, 30, founded Hackbright Academy in June to teach women how to program in a supportive, all-female environment. In its first year, the San Francisco course graduated 78 female software engineers, more than either UC Berkeley's or Stanford's undergraduate programs did in 2012.

Grad stats

According to the American Society for Engineering Education, 55 women graduated with computer science or related bachelor's degrees from UC Berkeley, and 27 women graduated with computer science degrees from Stanford in 2012.
"With Hackbright, we thought we could solve two problems," Philips said. "We thought we could help increase the number of women in engineering and also increase the number of talented engineers so companies can hire them."
For a fee of $12,000 per student, Hackbright Academy ( www.hackbrightacademy.com) teaches 20 to 30 women to program in a 10-week crash course on software engineering. Students have access to five full-time instructors and three mentors in the industry. After working on projects in pairs for the first five weeks, students complete a final project, which they present to about 25 prospective employers during a career day.
"It was shockingly easy to find a job," Hackbright alumna Nicole Zuckerman, 31, said.
Zuckerman attended Hackbright after leaving her job in publishing, where she didn't see any potential for personal growth outside of management. She now works on Web projects and troubleshoots existing Web features as a software developer at Eventbrite. After career day, Zuckerman had seven interviews and three job offers.
"It came down to which was a better lifestyle fit," Zuckerman said. "Having that choice was kind of unreal for me. It was the first time I had that happen."

'Impostor syndrome'

Hackbright also encourages its students in their career pursuits by teaching them to overcome "impostor syndrome," a doubt in one's own achievements frequently experienced by women in tech jobs.
"I don't want to make it a gender thing, but I do think it's kind of a gender thing," said 28-year-old alumna Jacmine Tsai, now a software developer at Change.org. "There's an unexamined stereotype in your head: It's too hard for girls."
Hackbright pushes its students to promote themselves as software developers by giving them business cards during their second week of class and instructing them to refer to themselves not as students, but as programmers.
"Because of the really stellar instruction and because of the community we have, I was able to say I'm a software engineer at a party while I was a software engineering student," alumna Kathryn King, 29, said. "That was how I got my first freelance gig."

'A special bond'

King quit her nanny job in Chicago before attending Hackbright and becoming a software developer at Eventbrite. Although she's an alumna, King remains a part of the Hackbright community.
"There's this group of people who understand what you've been through more than anyone else in your life," King said. "You build professional connections and friendships, but there's also a special bond there."

Jessica Floum is a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. E-mail: business@sfchronicle.com

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Class of 2013: What's Pushing Women Out of the Sciences

Originally posted by Bruce Kasanoff here
May 21, 2013

Graduates of 2013, you don't need to hear from another gray-haired man. The invitation to create this speech arrived the same day my daughter - who is also graduating this month - sent me a draft of her senior thesis. I took this as a sign it would be more helpful for me to share insights from one of your own.

Alyssa's thesis explores why women drop out of STEM majors: science, technology, engineering and math.

In the United States, men comprise about 75% of all STEM majors. There are many reasons why this is a problem, but let me just state the most obvious. For economic reasons, we need far more people to go into these majors; if half our citizens shy away from these majors, we will never have as much talent as we need.

I'd like to suggest that it is up to you to solve this problem. Not because my generation can't solve it, but because we haven't.

Alyssa attends Hamilton College in upstate New York. When it comes to attracting women to STEM majors, Hamilton actually does better than many colleges and universities. Most of their science departments, except for Computer Science and Physics, have roughly equal numbers of men and women. For the first time ever, this year their math department has more female than male majors.

Alyssa interviewed two groups of women at Hamilton: current STEM majors and those who are STEM "dropouts."

Both groups perceived that STEM classes tend to be competitive and unfriendly, in contrast to how other courses are taught at Hamilton. The majors "dealt with it," but even they didn't like it.

To quote from Alyssa's thesis: most dropouts and majors agreed that the competitive culture and climate of the classroom was the worst in the introductory courses. These courses tended to encourage memorization and had a weed-out feel... students often felt like professors did not necessarily want to see them succeed.

College is supposed to be hard. You are supposed to be challenged. There is nothing wrong with that. Hamilton has many other majors that are also difficult, but female students perceive that they are not as competitive and unfriendly.

Hamilton is a small, liberal arts school. I can only imagine what many of you faced in larger schools. One thing is for certain: too few female graduates will be entering STEM professions this year, even though many of you remain interested in STEM areas.

Alyssa's thesis also reports that: the STEM dropouts were students who had legitimate interest in the fields, and who may have pursued the majors to completion had they not perceived an unwelcoming and dissatisfying culture. The STEM majors, on the other hand, were intensely dedicated and goal driven; most of them planned to become researchers or professors from a very young age and were not willing to let obstacles get in their way. That is, often times the STEM majors were unhappy with the STEM culture, yet had such a strong end goal in mind that they were willing to disregard their feelings about their courses, and sought out welcoming environments in other disciplines to compensate for their experiences in their major.
This is a huge problem, and it's not just because we're not attracting enough women into STEM majors. It's also a problem because we are teaching STEM professionals to interact in what some might consider to be an antisocial manner.

Our companies and institutions would be much better served by professionals who know how to collaborate on diverse teams. Increasingly, programmers and designers, engineers and marketers, data scientists and customer experience professionals must work side by side.

Some of you are STEM dropouts, but you still harbor an interest in these subjects. For you, I have two words: graduate school. It's not too late to give it one more try.

Some of you are STEM graduates. Some will go into teaching, or training. You will work with other disciplines. At the risk of sounding like an old softie, I urge you to work towards a kinder, gentler, and more welcoming environment. I find it difficult to understand why computer science or math can't be taught in small groups, especially when I see kids in my neighborhood - literally kids - teaching each other to program, and to solve tough programming challenges.

The prolific author, Douglas Rushkoff, wrote a book called Program or Be Programmed. “Choose the former,” says Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”
The prolific author, Douglas Rushkoff, wrote a book called Program or Be Programmed. “Choose the former,” says Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

Your generation can't allow programming and Big Data and product development and hard science to be the domain of half our population. You can't afford to condemn the women who all their lives have wanted to work in STEM professions to spend their careers as a minority.

My generation got it wrong. Yours can do far better.

Bruce Kasanoff (Twitter: NowPossible) can be found at Kasanoff.com.

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How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’

OPINION, NY Times

By ELLEN ULLMAN

Published: May 18, 2013

I WAS an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus, who provide the structure without your taking much notice of their melodic lines. I made realistic schedules and met my deadlines. Those were decent accomplishments.

Tamara Shopsin

But none of it qualified me as extraordinary in the great programmer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished me is the fact that I was a “woman programmer.” The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

Let me separate the two words and begin with what it means to become a programmer.

The first requirement for programming is a passion for the work, a deep need to probe the mysterious space between human thoughts and what a machine can understand; between human desires and how machines might satisfy them.

The second requirement is a high tolerance for failure. Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. In the words of the great John Backus, inventor of the Fortran programming language: “You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”

Now to the “woman” question.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against “hostile environments for women.” I endured a client — a sweaty man with pendulous earlobes — who stroked my back as I worked to fix his system. At any moment I expected him to snap my bra. I considered installing a small software bomb but understood, right then, what was more important to me than revenge: the desire to create good systems.

 I had a boss who said flatly, “I hate to hire all you girls but you’re too damned smart.” By “all” he meant three but, at the time, it was rare to find even one woman in a well-placed technical position. At a meeting, he kept interrupting me to say, “Gee, you sure have pretty hair.” By then I realized he was teaching me a great deal about computing. It would be a complicated professional relationship, in which his occasional need for male dominance would surface.

So, on that day of my pretty hair, I leaned to one side and said, “I’m just going to let that nonsense fly over my shoulder.” The meeting went on. We discussed the principles of relational databases, which later led me to explore deeper reaches of programming, closer to operating systems and networks, where I would find my real passion for the work. My leaning to one side, not confronting him, letting him be the flawed man he was, changed the direction of my technical life.

 Over the 20 years that followed, I found that being a woman put me at one remove from the general society of programmers. I resented that distance, but I liked to think that it was in some way fortunate — that my standing back gave me a clearer view of our profession and its effects on society at large.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women comprise 29.4 percent of people working in “Computer and Software,” a subcategory of “Commercial Equipment.” Since this broad (and vague) designation might include everyone from system designers to office assistants, it tells us nothing about the participation of women at the deeper technical and theoretical levels. By “deeper” I mean computer science, hardware and software engineering, the creation of operating systems and deep algorithms — in short, the levels at which the future of technology is being defined.

I touched those fundamental levels as a software engineer but never plumbed their depths. Yet I could see that, at the deeper reaches, it was as if some plague had specialized in the killing of females. I looked around and wondered, “Where are all the other women?” We women found ourselves nearly alone, outsiders in a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming. This strange illness meanwhile left the female survivors with an odd glow that made them too visible, scrutinized too closely, held to higher standards. It placed upon them the terrible burden of being not only good but the best.

Women today face a new, more virile and virulent sexism. The definition of success has somehow become running your own start-up. And venture capitalists decide who will get funding, who will get a chance for that success. Venture capitalists are all but explicit in their search: they want a couple of guys who can write an app over a weekend.

If hired by start-ups, younger women find themselves sorely underrepresented. One woman told me that in her growing, 24-person company there were four women, which is “considered a good ratio.” And, as always, our ranks thin at the deeper technical levels. We get stalled at marketing and customer support, writing scripts for Web pages. Yet coding, looking into the algorithmic depths, getting close to the machine, is the driver of technology; and technology, in turn, is driving fundamental changes in personal, social and political life.

The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how strong the social structure, there is always that cheek-slapped moment when you are alone with the anti-woman prejudice: the joke, the leer, the disregard, the invisibility, the inescapable fact that the moment you walk through the door you are seen as lesser, no matter what your credentials.

I have no guidance for women who want to rise through the ranks into technical management. I have led a peripatetic life, moving on when a project was done or the next thing intrigued me.

And I am not advising younger women (or any woman) to tough it out. You can lash back, which I have done too often and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea.

But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

Ellen Ullman is a former software engineer and the author of the memoir “Close to the Machine” and the novels “The Bug” and “By Blood.”

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women & girls leadership summit 2013 (may 1 in sf)

Registration and additional details

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CompTIA Webinar 5-1: Quiet Women (In IT) Never Changed History

Upcoming Webinars

Be Strong...Stand Up...Stand Out - Quiet Women Never Changed History

May 1, 2013, 10:30 a.m. (CT)

Presented by Pattie Grimm, WW Partner Skills Development Director, Microsoft
Powered by the CompTIA Advancing Women in IT Community
Focusing on empowering women to understand how to leverage their strengths and how to “thrive” in IT, this session will provide practical exercises and tips which can be applied immediately such as:

• How to be strong and assertive without being perceived as “aggressive”
• How to stand up in meetings and have an impact on the business
• How to stand out and help other women (especially young women) thrive in the future

For questions about CompTIA webinars, contact webinars@comptia.org.  For questions about CompTIA webinars qualifying for CEUs, contact CEaudit@comptia.org.

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Women are making gains in booming tech-consulting market

National unemployment rate among tech pros is at 3.5 percent, though the rates vary significantly by job function

April 15, 2013, By Ted Samson | InfoWorld

While the average unemployment rate for technology professionals is a mere 3.5 percent -- significantly lower than the national average of 7.7 percent -- the rates vary by job function. Among Web developers, it's just 1.0 percent, whereas programmers will see a rate of around 6.3 percent. Meanwhile, there's been a surge in technology-consulting positions, and women are grabbing a relatively high number of those new jobs.

Such are the data points the folks at Dice.com culled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest unemployment numbers. Overall, there's been a shift in the tech job market since Q1 2012, when the unemployment for technology pros was at 4.4 percent, compared to the national average of 8.3 percent.




On the tech-consulting front, U.S. companies have created 543,500 new positions since March 2004, the last time the unemployment rate for IT pros exceeded the national average. In the first quarter of this year alone, 17,200 new consulting positions emerged. Whereas consulting jobs have increased significantly over the past nine years, the same can't be said for computer and electronics manufacturing; there's been a loss of 236,300 jobs over the past nine years. What's more, 17,000 gigs in data processing and hosting have been shed.

As to why the number of consulting jobs has continued to rise, Dice attributes the trend to the fact that "companies want to remain flexible because there continues to be a fair amount of economic uncertainty," Dice VP of corporate communications Jennifer Bewley told InfoWorld. "Shortages in particular fields also drive companies to utilize consulting firms to push projects through."

In regard to the economic uncertainty, Bewley noted that temp jobs are accelerating across the board. "In February, those temp positions grew 5 percent year-over-year; now it's 6 percent. That may seem small, but the sequential increase was more than two times what one would expect between those two months," she said.

Notably, women -- traditionally underrepresented in the tech field -- have made significant gains on the consulting front, according to Dice. The number has grown by 156,100 over the past nine years, and around 46 percent of the new consulting positions created in Q1 were awarded to women. Still, women represent a steady 31 percent of the U.S. tech workforce.

According to Dice, the jump in women landing tech-consulting job means "the position gap is still evident, even if the like-for-like pay gap has disappeared." Indeed, according to InfoWorld blogger Bill Snyder, equal pay for equal work is a reality in IT, but few women rise to the higher positions, and overall inequity is worsening.

Dice provided a breakdown of the current unemployment rates among various tech-job functions as of the end of Q1:
Programmers are suffering the highest unemployment rate among technology pros, at 6.3 percent
Computer support specialists are at around 5.7 percent
For computer-systems analysts, the unemployment at the end of Q1 was 3.7 percent
Among computer and information systems managers, the rate is at 3.5 percent
Network and system administrators are seeing an unemployment rate is 3.1 percent
For database admins, it's around 2.8 percent
The rate for software developers is at 2.2 percent
Network architects have an average unemployment rate of 1.7 percent
Web developers have the lowest unemployment rate on the list at 1.0 percent

Advocates who favor increasing the number of H-1B visas -- including Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, and Yahoo -- will certainly point to the relatively low unemployment rate among techies to advance their agenda. The argument: A low unemployment rates translates to a shortage of skilled IT workers, which in turn necessitates importing talent from overseas. According to Economic Policy Institute immigration policy analyst Daniel Costa, however, the traditional full unemployment rate for computer scientists and engineers traditionally peaks at around 2 percent, based on BLS data.

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How to encourage female students to consider STEM programs

For many female students in high school or college, careers in science, technology, engineering or math are just not on their radar screens.  They can't picture themselves in occupations like information technology, construction, or engineering. What can educators do to help women and girls realize that careers in STEM can be a fulfilling and rewarding choice?

The first step is to introduce female students to images of female role models on the job.  When female students repeatedly see images like those in the banners of women looking happy on the job and working with equipment, they can start to see themselves in these career pathways.

See all of the Role Model Banners 

Where is the best place for female students to see these images? The answer is: everywhere! Seeing them repeatedly helps imprint images of female role models on the minds of your female and male students.

Hang the banners all over your campus in classrooms, hallways, libraries, lunch rooms, student lounges and counseling offices. Plus, bring them to events. Every career fair, student orientation, and student recruitment event can have a women in STEM table with banners to send a strong message that women are not only encouraged, they are celebrated for pursuing STEM career pathways at your school.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to bring these images to your whole school, district, region or even state.  That's why when you order six or more banners, in any combination, you receive a discount of 20%.  To receive the 20% discount on six or more banners, use the coupon code BANNER20 at checkout. What if your region or district has bigger needs?  Contact us at  store@iwitts.organd we can work with you to provide a discount for larger quantities.

I hope you'll get started now so that female students will start seeing these images in your schools, right away!

Warmly,

Donna Milgram

Executive Director - Institute for Women in Trades, Technology Science

PS Don't forget, when you order six or more banners, in any combination, you'll save 20%. To receive the 20% discount on six or more banners, use the coupon code BANNER20 at checkout.  If your region or district has bigger needs, contact us at store@iwitts.organd we can work with you to provide a discount for larger quantities.
 

Check out the Women in Trades, Technology and Engineering Banners 

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If you want to solve the IT skills gap, fix the gender gap

NextGov

In October, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a speech at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York where he stated “cyberspace is the new frontier.” Ears really perked when he said that cyber actors have already infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure, including the computers that operate chemical plants, the electric grid, and water facilities. Such collective attacks could result in a cyber Pearl Harbor, he said.

The candor with which government leaders are referring to the cyber threat isn’t surprising. There have been countless memoranda, reports, and speeches detailing the need to bolster the cybersecurity workforce as a result of continued cybersecurity breaches in federal IT systems. In the coming year and beyond, agencies want to hire more cybersecurity professionals to fill this growing need.

But agencies face a big problem – the shortfall of skilled professionals. A recent report by the Homeland Security Department’s cyber skills task force detailed the need for 600 new cybersecurity professionals in the near term who have mission critical skills. Finding these professionals is difficult given that agencies have to compete with government contractors and others in the private sector to hire them. While the DHS cyber skills report largely focused on the need for technical competencies, another report released by the Government Accountability Office in November 2011 found that nearly every agency has experienced difficulty in hiring cyber workers.

Agencies across government will need to train or hire more people with the right skills in the coming year and beyond. To make up for this shortfall, most experts recommend creating a pipeline of applicants by starting early in the primary school grades to get students interested in STEM fields.
But there’s another challenge associated with recruiting skilled workers: Most of those going into STEM fields are men. Only 13 percent of the US cybersecurity professionals are women. Further, the number of women enrolling in computer science degrees is actually decreasing. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science graduates were women; in 2005, women only made up 22 percent. Despite the growing need for cybersecurity professionals, female enrollment in the fields necessary to get into these jobs continues to decrease. In fact, in 2010 only about 18 percent of undergraduates in STEM fields were women.

Women, being about half the population, are a largely untapped resource for cybersecurity recruitment. In a recent study, women claimed they encountered more institutional barriers to entering cybersecurity fields. For example, the largely male-oriented “hacker” culture prevalent in IT can be hard for girls and women to penetrate and leaves them with fewer opportunities for building mentor-mentee relationships. A lack of interest in STEM fields also attributes to low participation numbers. Perhaps attributed to the lack of women in science and math teaching professions, the gap exists in middle school and increases in high school.

Creating a pipeline of cybersecurity applicants will involve more than scholarships and competitions to recruit the professionals the government will need. Addressing the barriers to entry for women would open up a group of potential applicants largely overlooked in the past.

Find more insights and trends that the federal IT community will be facing in 2013 and beyond in a recent study released for the Government Business Council. And visit Nextgov Prime on December 3^rd to continue the conversation with leading thinkers, members of Congress and other experts in technology.

 

Dana Grinshpan

Dana Grinshpan is the Research Manager for the Government Business Council (GBC), the research division of Government Executive, where she specializes in primary research development and survey instrument creation. Prior to joining GBC, she worked for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), assisting in the research and writing of work on South Asian regional cooperation. She has a Master of Arts in international security and political economics from the University of Chicago and graduated magna cum laude from Ohio State University where she holds a B.A. in international studies with a minor in Arabic.

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FREE CA Perkins Nontraditional & Special Populations Regional Workshops

Schedule yours now or attend one in your area!

Why: Perkins legislation requires you and your staff to participate in professional development! The JSPAC makes that easy!

What: Outcomes, participants will be able to do the following by the end of this workshop:

• Understand the basics of Perkins IV legislation and the Core Indicators
• Analyze data for accuracy, program planning, evaluation and improvement using Perkins IV
• Discuss the Root Causes of & Strategies for addressing internal, situational, and school based barriers that prevent students from being successful in CTE programs & occupations
• Identify the steps students should take as they select a program or career
• Begin to Develop a unified regional team & plan to close Core Indicator gaps and increase student success

Invite All: Educators from K-12, Adult Education and Community Colleges, WIA and SB70 grant recipients,Nontraditional & Special Populations educators & program coordinators; academic and CTE educators and teachers, Perkins IV coordinators; Counselors, CTE Deans and administrators; Title IX/504/equity coordinators; CalWORKs One-Stop directors & staff; student support staff; grant writers; institutional researchers; etc.

*To schedule a workshop contact Elizabeth Wallner at eawallner@gmail.com

More information & FREE registration available at www.jspac.org

Regional Workshop Dates:

• October 19, 2012 — CCCAOE Conference, Long Beach
• October 25, 2012 — San Diego City College
• October 26, 2012 — Palomar College
• December 4, 2012 — JSPAC Conference, Sacramento (with paid conference registration)
• February 8, 2013 — San Bernardino ROP
• March 10-12, 2013 — Educating For Careers, Sacramento*
• April 12-13, 2012 — CITEA Conference, Oakland
• LA/Orange City — Dates TBD
• Your School or College?

*Applied, submission not yet accepted as of 10/15/2012

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CompTIA Webinar: IT Careers – The Inside Scoop

November 7, 2012, 10:00 a.m. (CT)

Powered by the CompTIA Advancing Women in IT Community

It’s time to dream and see yourself in a brighter future. Positions are waiting for you in Information Technology. Whether it’s your first, next or re-entry into an IT position, the more information you have the easier it will be to find the IT position that is right for you.

At this webinar you will hear from experts, people who work in HR and hire people into positions in IT. They will be focusing on three IT Career Areas: Technical, Sales, and Operational/Management. They will let you know the types of positions available in these IT areas and what qualification companies look for when hiring in these positions. This will be a very interactive webinar giving you the opportunity pose your questions to the experts.

For questions about CompTIA webinars, contact webinars@comptia.org.

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