Obama Kicks Off US Effort to Fill High-Paying Tech Jobs

President Barack Obama kicked off an initiative Monday intended to train more people for higher-paying jobs in high-technology services as he seeks to counter wage stagnation in an economy that has otherwise been improving.

Even as unemployment has fallen to 5.5 percent, few U.S. workers are seeing more money in their pockets. The president announced that his administration had enlisted 21 cities or regions and about 300 private-sector employers to expand training programs and would chip in $100 million (roughly Rs. 628 crores) in federal money for grants to encourage innovative approaches.

"We are going to more effectively capture what is the boundless energy and talent of Americans who have the will but sometimes need a little help clearing out the way," Obama told an audience of mayors and other municipal leaders attending a conference of the National League of Cities in Washington. "Help them get on a path to fill the new jobs of this century. And that's what middle-class economics looks like."

Of about 5 million unfilled jobs in the United States, White House officials said about 500,000 are in high-technology areas like software development, network administration and computer security. The average job requiring technology skills pays about 50 percent more than the average private-sector job, according to the White House.

The president's initiative, called TechHire, will focus on regions of the country with more than 120,000 open technology jobs. The participating municipalities and employers will explore new ways to recruit and train workers. Among the cities participating will be New York; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Louisville, Kentucky; St. Louis; San Antonio; Portland, Oregon; and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

New York, for instance, will expand commitments to prepare students in the City University of New York system and connect them to paid internships, White House officials said. Working in partnership with the Flatiron School, a pioneer among so-called coding academies that focus extensively on computer science, New York will also expand a Web development fellowship for 18- to 26-year-olds without a college degree.

Adam Enbar, a co-founder of the Flatiron School, said his academy, which started in the fall of 2012, provided three to five months of training to students and now graduates about 300 a year who move on to jobs paying on average of $70,000 annually at places like Google  and Intel.

"We just started a school out of nowhere. We had no pedigree," Enbar said. "The fact that these companies are hiring from a school like ours shows that there's a thirst for talent and that the traditional training programs aren't working."

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