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Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Urban League Of Metropolitan Seattle Launches Urban Tech Jobs Program

Michelle Merriweather

The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle (ULMS) is excited to partner with the National Urban League to launch the Urban Tech Jobs Program, funded wholly by the U.S. Department of Labor (“USDOL”) Ready To Work (“RTW”) grant.

The Urban Tech Jobs Program (UTJP) is an accelerated training program that recruits long-term unemployed adults from the greater metropolitan Seattle area and provides them with workshops, access to job readiness tools and the opportunity to build solid adaptability skills in order to respond to a fast paced, high demand technical environment – at no cost to the individual. The cohort will meet at Seattle Central College, three times per week, for approximately six weeks.

The program is a reflection of ULMS’ 2020 Vision, which aims to change the trajectory for African Americans and other underrepresented communities in the region – to advance our engagement in the digital revolution. ULMS will be recruiting, incubating, and expanding accelerated tech learning programs – such as coding boot camps and innovative online training – which enable interested students to rapidly gain tech skills.

“African Americans are among the most likely to own a cellphone, yet among the least likely to work for one of the major technology firms,” says Michelle Merriweather, President & CEO, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. “In other words, in the tech sector, we are more likely to be consumers than employees — and what that says is that the real opportunities created by the tech world are being missed by our community. The Urban Tech Program is a constructive tool to locally address those issues.”

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A 2018 Pew research study shows how African Americans in particular are still severely underrepresented in STEM occupations. According to the National Urban League’s State of Black Americareport, just 8.2 percent of all degrees Blacks achieved in 2015 – 2016 were in STEM fields; and only 5.7 percent of Blacks employed in 2017 were working in the tech industry.

To help close the digital divide, upon completion of the Urban Tech program, participants will be eligible to become certified in Cloud Computing via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Along with authenticated tech training, participants can vastly improve tech skills, increase job adaptability, earn $75 bi-weekly, and increase future potential pay scale.

The deadline to register is September 5, and the six-week course starts on September 9, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. Visit www.urbanleague.org/urban-tech to learn more about the program and enroll today!

 

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