42 minute read
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Three Arkansas tech startups are changing the meaning of that old adage BY DWAIN HEBDA
ENTREPRENEURS LIKE MOVISTA co-founders April Seggebruch and Stan Zylowski are opening new doors for Arkansas's tech community.
NOVO STUDIO
Time was, if you were going to be taken seriously in the tech world, you headed to where the action was—geeky coastal hubs of talent, where tech-savvy investors were rumored to lurk around every corner and behind every bush.
But look around in 2021 and you’ll discover that the most desirable addresses in tech these days are less likely to be found on the coasts. Instead, as reported in Inc. Magazine last February, tech entrepreneurs and industry giants alike are forgoing the traditional enclaves and heading to the desert (Phoenix, Reno), the South (Nashville), and the Gulf (New Orleans).
And why? Economics, primarily. The costs of living and of doing business are substantially lower in these emerging cities (although Austin and Nashville show how fast those cost indexes can catch up). Another reason is, frankly, because they can. With the coronavirus pandemic forcing many people in tech to work from home, the importance of being located in any given place has been greatly diluted. And considering that tech is already hard up for qualified talent, employees are finding they have more leverage than ever to live where they love; they can just log in to do the rest.
Arkansas has yet to reach the tech density of some other places, but it’s absolutely incorrect to think there aren’t innovative, cutting-edge companies starting up right here in The Natural State. The following are three such maverick firms that bucked the old location trend and won.
MOVISTA
MOVISTA IS A company that would be right at home in any tech hotbed you could name—Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York, to name a few. But the developer of retail management tools, which two years ago landed $12 million in venture capital financing to accelerate its operations and development, resides instead in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Company co-founder April Seggebruch says the company is a testament to The Natural State’s business-forward environment, especially as it pertains to startups. “The code you write in Arkansas is identical to the code you write in California. The altitude or the air quality does not impact your coding,” she says. “If nothing else, COVID has demonstrated that hiring knows no geographical boundaries. You can work from anywhere.”
It’s a fact, she says, that there aren’t as many tech companies in Arkansas as there are on the West Coast. “But that’s also a challenge to that next technologist with the next great idea to start their own tech company,” says Seggebruch. “I can assure you, from an investment and from a business front, there’s a lot of support and a lot of momentum here behind creating more of those companies. That level of community support is something the West Coast does not have.”
Movista launched its first product 10 years ago and has since grown into a major player in bringing retail management operations into the digital age. Its signature project, Movista One, helps retail managers assign and track work assignments across multiple locations quickly and efficiently.
Co-founder Stan Zylowski says the quality of the company’s people plays a huge role in Movista’s success, and, together, they’ve crafted a broad culture that approaches its mission differently from other tech companies. “There’s this whole idea that working in the tech industry, you need to be a developer of code,” says Zylowski. “That’s an absolute falsehood. As a matter of fact, we’re in a time where there is such an acceleration in the intelligence of the way code is developed that the image of people sitting and just pounding out lines of code is going to go away. As the technology gets smarter and smarter, the languages are so much more simplified that the value in a technology company is way more about the creativity of the product, the design element, the simplicity, the way that it’s marketed, et cetera.”
In this new environment, says Zylowski, the most valuable employees will be those who can understand how to identify customers’ problems and envision products that meet those needs and make worklife easier. “To work in an environment where the actual product or value delivered is via software or via technology, yes, every company has to have technologists. But I’m the CEO of a tech company and I can’t read code. And there’s an entire cadre of people who work for us who do nothing but design
the product and none of them can write code.
“What they are expert at doing is listening and discerning what the problem is. That’s what we call the ‘what.’ They figure out the ‘what’ side of the equation and then someone else figures out the ‘how’ side.”
The company harnesses this mentality to quickly and effectively pivot to meet customer needs. Case in point: During the pandemic, the Movista One platform was adapted to help companies track and monitor COVID-19 protocols among employees. This not only helps keep people safe, but provides statistical data that lets the company know if there’s a spike at a given location.
“Technology is, by its nature, fluid and iterative,” Zylowski says. “So, for anyone who’s been around video games, you’d never have had Atari if you hadn’t had Pong. You’d never have had Nintendo if you hadn’t had Atari. It’s a building block-type thing.”
“We need our technologists to be flexible and skate to where the puck’s going,” says Seggebruch. “That’s a fundamentally important thing to remember, to remain flexible. Always be out there looking at what’s the next thing.”
As the company has prospered—employee headcount is more than 100 at present—the co-founders have taken active roles in promoting Arkansas’s tech community in an effort to attract and retain the best and brightest homegrown talent. And while they agree that strides have been made, there’s plenty of untapped potential yet to be mined.
“The great equalizer is the computer. People of color, gender minorities, not only are they not marginalized in the technical sphere, they are coveted as resources in the technical sphere,” Zylowski says. “We cannot find and recruit enough minority talent. We just can’t find them and that’s a challenge. It clearly hampers the breadth of thought around the ‘what,’ right? I mean, you don’t have that key insight.
“That’s a point I would want to make and would encourage people of all different backgrounds, race, sex, whatever, to consider a technological or technology job.”
IDESTINI
LIKE MANY PEOPLE, Abby Sims found her professional road to be anything but a straight path. But what the founder of Idestini in Bryant has always had was an eye for opportunity.
“I definitely think you need to cast a wide net and take the opportunities that come,” she says. “If you want to be a great video game programmer, that’s awesome, but you might have to do something else first. You might need that to be your side passion that you work on nights and weekends. Work is not always sexy and we all have to cut our teeth and learn. There are some really good things that we can learn from places that you wouldn’t even think that you’re attracted to.”
Sims launched Idestini in 2014, delivering custom software solutions to clients as varied as national sports governing bodies to international corporations. She says the sum total of her previous work experiences laid the foundation for her company’s success. “When you’re starting out, you need to be wide open to opportunity because, first off, you can’t wait for that dream job. If you wait for that dream job, you’re going to be behind,” she says. “You’re better off doing something. It’s like training for a big game; you’re better off practicing than sitting on the bench.”
For most of her career, Sims had no designs on launching her own business. But after working remotely for one of her employers, she started to get a taste for keeping her own hours and acting like her own boss. “I started thinking, ‘What if I got my own clients? What if I did this myself?’” she says. Idestini launched shortly thereafter.
Sims grew up on the East Coast. A bright student who finished high school bound to be a journalist, she got a rude awakening in college. “I figured out I hated journalism school,” she says. “I dropped out of college and went back home trying to figure out what to do with myself. I ended up taking coursework at what then would be like an ITT Tech school in New Jersey.”
Even with 300 hours in computer programming and web design, and gathering some work experience along the way, Sims saw her tech career get derailed before it even started thanks to the one-two punch of the dot.com bubble bursting and 9/11. “Here I am, in between Philadelphia and New York City, and I’m one of, like, 6,000 people applying for a job,” she says. “It was not a good time to be where I was, looking to start my career in tech.”
Moving to Arkansas’s greener job pastures landed her in Arkadelphia, then Little Rock. A string of tech roles followed, from the Arkansas Crime Lab to Southwest Power Pool to state government. Each stop allowed her to sharpen her skills and exposed her to what was new in tech. “I had an opportunity to work for Rockfish Interactive in Little Rock,” she says. “That was a lot of fun because we worked on a lot of social media, digital web app stuff. We had two campaigns for White Cloud Toilet Paper; we used to make apps to put on Facebook for people to submit their photos, and then the community would vote on the best things that had been made out of used toilet paper rolls.
“With Sam’s Club, we did a virtual cheese tour, where new cheeses would unlock every week. They were from all around the world and, obviously, Sam’s Club was trying to promote that they were carrying these products in their stores. We got to work on some highly interactive, fun, visual stuff.”
Sims says a key takeaway from her journey from employee to entrepreneur is something she reiterates to the many interns who have come to work for her over the years. That is, working your way to your dream job often comes with paying one’s dues in other positions. She hands out similar facts of tech life to women and minorities considering the tech field. “I’ve always felt welcomed in the places that I’ve worked here in Arkansas,” she says, “but women are still going to have to be willing to be the only woman in the room for a while. That’s just part of our journey. There are going to be places where it’s going to be more diverse and there’s going to be places where you might be the only woman and we need to be okay with
FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT: Zylowski and Seggebruch strategize on a project at Movista company headquarters.
NOVO STUDIO
SCHOOL'S IN SESSION: Jeston George (top right) founded Apptegy after seeing the many messages home from his nephew's teachers. Company employees fashion integrated digital tools through creativity and teamwork, says Tyler Vawser (bottom left).
that, right? It’s worth it. It really is worth it. It’s such a good career field and there are so many amazing opportunities.
“Plus, there really is an interest here in building a diverse workforce, whether you’re a woman or a minority. Companies today are eager to have diversity, they’re eager to bring more women into tech, and the only way to do that is to interview more women. So, I would just really encourage girls, even if they go to college and major in something else, to take a programming class and give it a shot. They may enjoy it more than they think.”
APPTEGY
IN THE BUSINESS world, companies go to great lengths and considerable expense to develop their brand based on products or services. Schools have traditionally lagged in telling their stories effectively, even to their own students and parents.
Little Rock-based Apptegy was created out of the need for better communication between schools and their existing families. “We offer a tech product that helps school leaders bring all of their information to one place, and it makes it really easy for them to communicate,” says Tyler Vawser, Apptegy’s vice president of people. “The goal is not just to send out a text message, but to create an experience and to highlight that school district’s strengths.
“School choice has become such a big topic. Superintendents, especially public school superintendents, are wrestling with this idea of private schools, charter schools, even virtual schools, and, depending on their location, they’re all fighting for the same students. The question we ask them is, ‘How, as a school district, are you going to stand out—and how are you making sure that you’re communicating your strengths?’”
The company got its start when founder Jeston George noticed his nephew’s kindergarten teacher spent a lot of time on phone calls and texts reminding parents of upcoming school events and deadlines. George wondered why this couldn’t be automated via an app or website.
Turns out the problem wasn’t that such tools didn’t exist; it’s that they weren’t integrated, as company officials found out when they started interviewing superintendents. “One of the things we kept hearing was they don’t really need another app,” says Vawser. “They already have enough systems. They can’t keep up with the systems they do have. ‘Our website is over here, our alert system is over there. We don’t have an app yet, but we also have to keep up with Facebook and Twitter.’
“So even in the early days, we moved from just thinking about how to build apps for schools to, ‘How do we help schools think about their whole communication strategy and really empower them to run their schools better in a way that doesn’t require more effort, more time, or more people?ʼ”
Apptegy developed powerful tools that not only allow school districts to tell their story, but are easy to update via Thrillshare, a product that delivers updates, alerts, texts, and announcements to whatever device the audience chooses to receive it. Teachers can update school news from field trips or coaches right from the sidelines, quickly and easily.
Building a better product was only part of the equation; building a new business required additional support and personnel. “When you’re trying to create something from nothing and scale it extremely rapidly, everything is an outsized challenge and you can’t fail at any of it, including development, sales, hiring, customer service, and funding,” says Jeston George. “I’ve been fortunate to benefit from a number of entrepreneurial support organizations and state agencies that were instrumental in helping us get going, such as Fund for Arkansas’ Future, the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, the Venture Center, and Innovate Arkansas.”
Among these needs are personnel. Vawser says that part of the challenge is that many prospective employees don’t know about tech companies like Apptegy that are based in Arkansas, even if they’re a game changer with national reach. “We’re not just a local company,” says Vawser. “Our clients are across 49 states and we work with over 1,500 school districts at this point, mostly public school districts, but we have some charter and private schools as well. There’s a lot of businesses that don’t have the national reach we do.
“However, one of the biggest issues is always going to be talent. You think about the biggest cities and what they have going for them, it’s that they have a lot more people to talk to and that means more experience, more variations of background. Little Rock doesn’t have as much of it, but what you do have are people more committed to being here long-term.”
Vawser says that while technical skills are getting easier to come by, thanks to computer courses in Arkansas schools, they aren’t the only thing he, as a hiring manager, looks for in an applicant. “One of the most important things you see in a lot of engineers is that they’re self-driven,” he says. “Some of our engineers have computer science degrees and some don’t. But all of them are very curious and self-driven. It doesn’t matter where you are—the Internet is there. So, you have access to most of the same resources here in Little Rock or anywhere in Arkansas that someone has in New York City or San Francisco or Shanghai. The question is, ‘What are you going to make of that?’ If you can self-teach and you can make use of those resources, that’s a very interesting profile for us.”
When it comes to the subject of broadband access, Elizabeth Bowles doesn’t pull any punches. The president and CEO of Aristotle Inc., an Internet service provider, digital product development lab, and digital marketing agency, Bowles considers such access critical on multiple fronts of education, healthcare, and commerce. “Purdue University did a study showing that for every dollar you put into rural broadband, you bring back four dollars in economic development,” she says. “That’s huge anywhere, but especially in Arkansas’s rural communities.”
Bowles is so passionate about the benefits of bringing broadband to underserved rural areas that she’s become one of the nation’s leading voices on the subject. She’s testified before Congress and the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, as well as headed national trade groups pushing the issue before decision-makers. “Broadband is an area that’s universally good for everybody, especially where there’s competition among providers,” she says. “It’s good for consumers because they have a choice. It’s good for the providers because it drives up demand. It’s good for the economy because the providers compete to bring a good service that then improves the economic development and base within that community. That’s really the aim.”
Bowles says the widespread lack of broadband access puts rural communities at a distinct disadvantage, starting with education efforts for children. “Children who grow up in urban and suburban areas have access to resources, educational and otherwise, that children in rural and underserved communities don’t have,” says Bowles. “This creates a divide that’s not just digital, it’s also academic. Because of COVID-19, schools are closing in counties that have no way to get Internet to their children. So these kids won’t be able to do their homework, meaning they’ll fall behind—simply because they don’t have access to the Internet.
“And even when we’re not in a pandemic situation, there are so many resources and so much curriculum enrichment that are online-based. If people don’t have access to those things, they’re not being prepared for the gig economy, which is the future. In that case, we’re relegating certain segments of children to certain types of career paths. They’re starting from behind right out of the gate.”
The issue also extends to Main Street economic development, says Bowles. Communities already starving for new businesses are at a competitive disadvantage without broadband, both for fostering startups and for attracting new businesses, to say nothing about work-from-home opportunities. “From an economic development perspective, access to fixed broadband Internet is critical,” says Bowles. “I emphasize the word ‘fixed’ because a lot of rural areas have mobile broadband. But when a factory is looking at locating in a particular area, or a company is looking at opening a headquarters or a branch office, they’re assessing all of the resources available. They want to know that they can get broadband or fiber or whatever they need to their factory.
“More than that, they want to know that their employees can get broadband at home. If they can’t, the company isn’t going to be able to attract the right employees, because the employees won’t move there if their kids can’t get an education. So the lack of broadband in a community is a barrier to economic development.”
After years of banging the drum, Bowles and other rural broadband advocates have finally started to see some movement at the very highest levels of leadership in Arkansas. Last year, Governor Asa Hutchinson established the Arkansas Broadband Office within the state Department of Commerce and tasked it with implementing AR Rural Connect, which provides millions in grant money to communities to help them tackle the problem and attract service providers. The governor’s goal is for all Arkansas communities over 500 residents to have access to broadband by the end of 2022.
Bowles is also putting her company’s money toward making rural Arkansas on par with the rest of the state— and ahead of other rural areas nationwide. “My company is committed to doing this as fast as we possibly can,” she says. “We’ve brought in 16 teams, crews of four employees each. The only thing preventing us from moving more quickly is the supply chain and the inability to get gear or fiber or this or that.
“We’re also creating jobs; after we build these networks, we’ll hire staff, train people who can climb towers, people who can do installations, people who can do service calls and take phone calls and run an office. We’re looking at not only expanding the broadband network itself, but also educating and employing the people in these communities. Hopefully, that will encourage people to stay home rather than try to move to the city to find a job.
“I do believe everyone understands the urgency,” says Bowles. “But I think the provider industry also needs to step up and realize, if it takes you a year to put in a network, that’s a year that our kids are falling behind. The time is now.”
continued from page 37 an outstanding job, while the other ones were just kind of okay. So, in year two, we turned it around. The students came up with the project they wanted to do, and then we found mentors to match the projects.
In the third year, we added business students to the mix. We had 30 engineers and 20 business students in the program, the idea being that we would form teams of three plus two and do the same kinds of ambitious projects.
With that as background, in our discussions on innovation with local, regional, and state-based companies the topic of data science kept coming up. Many of our companies—current and potential future employers for our students—depend on data for their success and growth. As a result, the deans of three of the UA system’s colleges—J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences, led by Dean Todd Shields; Sam M. Walton College of Business, led by Dean Matt Waller; and the College of Engineering, led by Dean John English—got together and decided to end in itself.” create an exploratory team to understand this need and, if appropriate, to develop a curriculum to meet it. I was asked to chair that committee, the goal being to offer an official B.S. Data Science major as a collaboration of the three colleges. Our target date for the first course offerings was Fall 2020.
I COME FROM the business world—from Dell, IBM, Honeywell, midsized companies and start-ups. I have decades of experience working with data and systems, and I’ve been a senior executive at companies. I’ve worked on the technical side, and I’ve worked on the business side. I’ve been a general manager. I’ve managed $80-million divisions of companies. Data makes the world go round and, to me, without software and without data to do something with, a server is just a space heater or a doorstop.
That’s why today I have a tagline that appears on all my business communications: “Innovating for a Better World by Connecting Data and Technology to Business Value.” I think it’s especially important for these students to understand that data and their talents are a means to an end, as opposed to just an end in itself.
In fact, this whole years-long process began with intense discussions between members of our Data Sciences Curriculum Development Committee and senior business executives throughout Arkansas. The businesspeople were very specific in what they wanted a new Data Sciences curriculum to instill in their future tech employees. It really came down to six outcomes, of pretty much equal importance.
First was “Use of technologies for solving real-life data problems.” In other words, you can’t just rest on your tech knowledge per se. In a regular computer science curriculum, you could be taught how to create a file system, how to create a database, how to create an operating system, how to create a compiler, how to write things from first principles. But in our program, you’re going to use those things to get to the data. What’s important is making sure that the data’s right, that it’s clean, that it’s valid, and that you can then do things with the data. The example I use is, in the past you learned how to build a car. Now what we’re going to do is teach you to drive.
The second desired outcome was “Ability to develop models and draw conclusions.” It isn’t enough just to be able to analyze the data.
Our students will be able to create abstractions at a systems level, develop models from that, and then use those to draw conclusions from them.
Number three is “Critical thinking and problem-solving.” I use the example of an old-fashioned slide rule, an unfamiliar relic to most of today’s students. A slide rule helped a user with the digits, but not with the decimal point. So, once you ran through your engineering problem, you had to look at it and figure out the power of 10 in the answer. You had to figure out whether or not that made sense—and if it didn’t, then you might have something else wrong, too. In critical thinking, you’ve got to be able to look at things and say, “Is this reasonable? Is this rational? Does this make sense?”
Number four is “Interpreting and implicating.” You can’t just report the data—you’ve got to be able to draw conclusions and even project from it and be able to give that to senior decision-makers. Otherwise, what’s the value of the data?
Number five is “Communication skills.” Engineers and scientists have a reputation for lacking such skills, especially outside their own discipline. Our data science students will be able to communicate their knowledge of a project to someone who perhaps speaks a different “language”—a CEO, say, or a marketing director, or an engineer, or the public.
That leads us to number six, “Teamwork and knowledge transfer.” When our students graduate, they’ll already be used to working in in-
terdisciplinary teams, so they’ll start out in the business world understanding that everyone brings something to the table. In the Honors Innovation Experience pilot program, for example, I learned that there was a certain practicality that came from having the business students in the class with the engineers—the business students tended to ask really good questions that caused the engineers to think about cost, and how everything fit together. And, the business students benefited from the practicality and do-ability brought by the engineering students.
The important thing for me, personally, is that this ability to work with people from outside their field will give our students an edge career-wise over their peers from other schools. They’ll already find it normal to seek out people in other departments and disciplines to work together in solving problems.
TO MAKE CERTAIN that all our Data Science students are steeped in this kind of thinking, we designed this new multicollege interdisciplinary curriculum as a “hub and spoke” system, in which there is a core set of classes that all the students take, and then a series of concentrations that are 20 to 21 hours of the degree that are specific to their chosen field.
The B.S. Data Science Core includes 35 hours of general education in the areas of math, science, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. The Core also includes three key elements for Data Science:
Computing and Programming Foundation: Data Science lingua franca (R, Python); object-oriented programming (JAVA); programming algorithms and paradigms; data structures and databases; data processing; and cloud computing.
Statistics and Probability Foundation: Probability and statistics; multivariable math, including linear algebra; statistical methods for Data Science; decision-making; machine learning; and optimization.
Multidisciplinary Environment: Technical composition; the role of data science in today’s world; micro- and macroeconomics; business foundations; data visualization and communications; social issues in Data Science; and a mandatory two-semester multicollege interdisciplinary practicum.
Beyond the Core are 10 concentrations: Accounting Analytics; Bioinformatics; Biomedical and Healthcare Informatics; Business Data Analytics; Computational Analytics; Data Science Analytics; Geospatial Data Analytics; Operations Analytics; Social Data Analytics; and Supply Chain Analytics.
Finally, every student is part of an interdisciplinary team tackling a real-life capstone project. The plan is to get companies who would like to participate with us to give us real problems with real data for the students to work on. For example, I recently mentored an industrial engineering capstone project team whose problem, from the industry partner, was, “We need to improve our profitability by one percent. We don’t know how to do it, and we have millions of data records on our sales, but we need your help to figure out how to do that.” It’s a very open-ended problem. It’s a high-level definition, and it requires the students to be able to talk to people outside their domain and to research, identify, and use approaches completely new to them.
At first, they were scared to death. It was like, “Oh, my God!” I tried to help them learn how to think about it. “This is going to be the kind of problem you’re going to get when you go to work,” I said. At that time, they were eight or so months from graduating. “Then think secondly that it’s so broad that you actually can define what the solution is.” It’s also an open-ended problem, which brings its own challenges.
The team set up weekly calls with their interface at the company and met regularly as a team, so they were in good communication. I met with them every week to give them advice and counsel and they sought out subject matter experts from faculty and graduate students in specific areas of need.
In early April, after they had completed the project, I said, “Looking back at it now, how do you feel about it?”
“It actually wasn’t that bad,” they said. “You were right.” Now when they go out to get their first real problem to work on a team and also to work on a less than perfectly defined problem, they’re not going to freak out because they know there are paths to dealing with it. They just have to find those paths.
WE LAUNCHED THIS new curriculum this past fall, which was of course complicated by COVID-19. And yet we are 110 percent certain that we’ve developed a ground-breaking program that will position our Data Science students to be sought after by local, state, and regional companies. Only two other universities in the entire country—Ohio State and North Carolina State—have done anything remotely this ambitious, and we visited both schools and learned from their experience.
None of this, I must say, could’ve happened had not the deans of the UA System’s three colleges worked so extraordinarily well together. This is unique—it sure wasn’t this way when I went through school here. But when we kicked off this process, the three deans came to the meeting and spoke eloquently, and from the heart, about how important this curriculum change will be to our employers in the state and the region; to the university and its continuing reputation for excellence; and certainly to our students, who will graduate ready to make major contributions to their new employers. This is the future, and it is here.
Over the next five years, our goal is to expand this approach to data science education to colleges and universities throughout the state, in collaboration with the Arkansas Center for Data Sciences and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. But that is a story for another time.
Dr. Karl D. Schubert, FIET, is Professor of Practice and Associate Director of the Data Science Program for the College of Engineering, the Sam M. Walton College of Business, and the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences.
continued from page 40 judgment that there are other factors that are important, and the final pieces of the equipping I was already doing anyway.” Because nobody comes to a new job knowing all the specifics of the position.
That’s the mindset change we need to see on the employer’s part. But there also needs to be a change on the part of the job candidates too. Like the employers, they have to believe in this new opportunity. They have to see it as real. That’s a hard leap for some, who’ve been told over and over by teachers, parents, and potential employers that a four-year degree is the only way to success. They have to change their thinking: This is a true opportunity, this is attainable, and I don’t have to have a four-year degree to pursue it.
By companies’ moving to this apprenticeship model and saying we’re going to reach out sooner to non-traditional candidates, and by candidates’ realizing they don’t have to worry about that four-year degree, all of a sudden opportunity flourishes because the talent pool becomes huge. And that’s what we’re experiencing in Arkansas right now.
BUT THAT’S NOT the end of it—it’s just the beginning. Capability has to rise up to meet opportunity, which means that the people who want to be part of that talent pool have to take initial responsibility for equipping themselves. The equipping comes in two phases: There is the training they have to do on their own to show that they have the desire and the drive to succeed, plus some familiarity with what it means to work in IT. We at ACDS call this period the “pre-apprenticeship.” There are lots of online courses they can take, at little to no cost, and from which they’ll receive certificates of completion. These courses are important because the potential candidates aren’t just learning about various facets of IT; they’re also learning about themselves, determining, usually through trial and error, which path they want to go down.
They also need to pay attention to what we call the “soft skills”— interviewing, resumé writing, the importance of being collaborative. Back in the dark ages of computer science, engineers could do a little bit of everything—they gathered requirements, wrote the code, tested the code, and implemented the code. Today those are all unique occupations that come together in teams. So being comfortable working with others is a key requirement in today’s tech world.
The second phase of equipping comes through the apprenticeship program, which gets to our part of the bargain. But before I explain that, I need to step back and tell what ACDS has been doing while all those would-be apprentices are preparing themselves.
The process begins with ACDS teams fanning out and calling on employers and potential apprentices concurrently. On the employer side, every company uses IT in different ways. A data analyst at Walmart has a completely different job than does a data analyst at Lost Forty Brewery. That means the success of our apprenticeship program requires us to know—and completely understand—the intricate requirements of the jobs the employers are trying to fill. In order to gain that understanding, our Client Development team maintains deep interaction with some 150 employers across the state. If one is looking for, say, a cybersecurity specialist, we have to know specifically what kinds of things that person will be asked to do in that job, for that particular employer, and therefore what skills they need to have.
While this knowledge-gathering is happening on the demand side of the equation, our Talent Acquisition team is busy on the supply side. They are constantly in touch with universities and secondary schools, and in the future we intend to become a presence in K-12 education— such is our long-range plan for reinventing the Arkansas workforce for the 21st century.
But beyond these “traditional” routes to careers, we keep close tabs
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on various untraditional pipelines as well. All over Arkansas there are organizations that have responsibility for looking out for various groups of people. Local workforce boards—there are 10 of them throughout the state—represent displaced workers, re-entry program candidates, or non-college-goers who might find themselves unemployed or underemployed. And then there are organizations, such as Winrock International, that reach out to underserved populations—people from rural areas, veterans returning to civilian life, minorities, and women. All of these organizations are taking stock of these folks and trying to point them in the right job direction. The idea is to make sure as many as possible are gainfully employed.
ACDS creates partnerships with these organizations, because we’re all about casting a broad net to catch potential tech talent. But if these individual organizations are already trying to assess these people’s capabilities, why do they need ACDS? Well, often they don’t know where the right employers are, or don’t know the particular IT skills a certain employer is seeking. That’s where we come in. ACDS was created to be the state’s “omni IT workforce organization,” the go-between, the facilitator. We’re the hub of the IT workforce supply-and-demand wheel. We link all the spokes.
The next step for the Talent Acquisition team is to screen potential candidates via a phone interview, during which we collect information on education, work history, and past examples of self-learning tech-related tools. We also make notes about personality, inquisitiveness, and “coachability.” Candidates deemed promising are then invited to take our assessment test, which is designed to measure three qualities that are very important to success in IT careers: logic reasoning, verbal ability, and quantitative aptitude. This test can be adjusted to include specific job-related questions—for example, coding questions for candidates interested in pursuing software development.
That being said, this assessment is as much about candidates’ “stickto-itiveness” as it is about their analytical capability. Because it takes a while to get through it, and if they punt and say, “Well, this is too hard,” or, “This is taking too long,” then we know they don’t have what it takes to work in IT. Because throughout the tech world, the project mentality is just this way—you’ve got to stay with it, there is no perfect answer, you finally work through it and you get it. So being able to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty is a key aspect of being successful in an IT career.
NOW THE CLIENT Development and Talent Acquisition teams put their heads together—here are the jobs that need filling, and here are some well-vetted apprenticeship candidates. This is the moment that ACDS was created for—to match the right tech talent to the right tech job.
It is an intricate process to really understand the difference between what skills and personality traits make for a great developer instead of a great data analyst. We can guide candidates to the best career path for them and their abilities, be it on the hardware side as a network technician, or as someone who works in cybersecurity. These are things that aren’t application-specific but are related more to the general cyber environment as a whole. We’re also ongoing champions of tech talent. If our assessment is that they’re not quite ready, we’ll help them do what they need to do to become ready. Then we’ll help them connect with employers, because this is a whole new paradigm. These potential apprentices aren’t at college waiting for a traditional career placement opportunity. They’re out there in this ecosystem somewhat on their own, but we’re saying, “No, we don’t want you to be on your own. We want you to understand our apprenticeship model, and apply. We’re going to coach you along. We’re going to help you get to that minimum level of capability and then put you in front of those employers.”
For the employers, what we bring to their tables is assurance that they have a partner who understands the specificity of their IT demands, even those that aren’t taught in school, and that we can help lead them to the very tech candidates they need to find. It’s a new paradigm for the employers too. “We want you to come with us to meet these candidates earlier,” we say—”these minorities, these females, these veterans, these career changers.” And the employers have to experience that, a process that they’re not fully used to. “Yeah,” they say, “but is it going to work? Are they going to be able to take the next step?”
And this is where we have to get both sides confident that what we’re putting in the middle is this skill building, the apprenticeship training component that’s going to be spot-on. It’s going to be customized exactly the way employers need it to be. They have control over the curriculum. We make sure it’s integrated so that the employees—the now-apprentices who are already hired and are earning while they’re learning—are going to get two things at once. They’re going to get very targeted, specific classroom learning about tech skills; and at the same time the company will be providing on-the-job training to give these new employees the corporate context they need. If they’re being taught a particular coding language or specific techniques about data analytics, it’s because that will be applicable to the company and the job they’ve already been hired for. The employers win because they get productivity faster, and the candidates win because they get paid training to prepare them for a successful tech career.
WHENEVER I’M ASKED to describe the apprenticeship process, I inevitably summon up the image of a “three-legged stool.” The first two legs on that stool are employers and apprentices. And the third leg? It’s training. Without proper, proven training, the whole registered apprenticeship concept collapses. Training is the glue that holds this particular supply and demand together.
Let’s say that several employers are looking for cybersecurity talent, as is increasingly the case today. It makes sense then for ACDS and its training partners to devise a cybersecurity apprenticeship program during which these apprentices will be trained not only in general aspects of cybersecurity, but also in the specifics of the employer/sponsor. But how can we be sure of this? We become the experts by going to the experts.
For a recent cybersecurity apprenticeship program, ACDS approached the American Cyber Alliance (ACA) to become the training provider. ACA has access to some of the best minds in the cybersecurity field, people who aren’t just instructors but who have worked in the profession, whether for the Department of Defense or the military or in private business.
That’s a great example of the kinds of experts we’re working with to provide skill training for apprenticeship programs in the state of Arkansas. But our job doesn’t stop at just bringing their expertise to bear on our training programs. We evaluate whether or not their material is current, especially if they’ve taught such courses over and over. We want to be the conduit to the most current requirements and to make sure they add cutting-edge training to their curriculum. We also want them to provide labs and the kind of an environment that simulates, as closely as possible, what a person is going to be doing on the job.
With ACA, before we started the cybersecurity training, we brought in some employers to look at the curriculum built by these experts. The employers had a chance to tweak it—“a little less of this, a little more of
that.” This way, we ended up with an agreement by multiple businesses that our training aligned with their needs, meaning that our apprentices will be more likely to assimilate easily into their organizations and become productive as quickly as possible.
We call groups like ACA our “training partners,” and we’re partnering in the same way with such organizations as the University of Arkansas Global Campus in NWA, which does continuing education, the Arkansas Coding Academy in Conway, and ASU-Newport in Northeast Arkansas. There are two good reasons this model works so effectively: One, it’s employer driven, and two, ACDS acts as the evaluator to ensure that our apprenticeship programs are teaching the right skills. This way the companies start with something that’s proven, something they can trust.
More and more Arkansas employers are telling us that we’ve changed their thinking about opening their door to a broader population, but that their recruiting processes aren’t yet set up to reach those populations and those candidates effectively. So once again, we’re the hub. And in matching up that broader supply with the specific demand, we can help gauge if a candidate ought to go down this path or that one.
For you students and soon-to-be-grads, all of this is very good news indeed. While everyone is for producing more traditional four-year college tech graduates, a big piece of my heart goes out to those “nontraditional” computer lovers throughout our state. I think about the high school kid in, say, Dumas, Arkansas, who loves her computer and is intrigued by the capability that sits behind the screen of her smartphone. But she can’t afford to go to college and doesn’t really know what she’s going to do with her life.
There are passionate kids like that all over our state, and I don’t want to see them fall between the cracks. As someone who’s been working on this apprenticeship issue throughout this country for decades, I know that if we leave kids like that to fend for themselves, we’re going to end up with more failures than successes.
So what we in Arkansas have to do is continue to adjust our traditional ecosystem so that it makes a place for every one of those “nontraditional” computer lovers too. What some people still miss is how important a role these computer-savvy outliers can be to our state’s economic success. Collectively they have tech knowledge and tech drive, they’re young and eager, and they can contribute immediately. They are indeed a force to be reckoned with.
If you’re one of those outliers and you want to talk with someone about an apprenticeship, I invite you to contact our Talent Acquisition team at talent@acds.co. Your opportunity is knocking.
Lonnie Emard is Apprenticeship Director at the Arkansas Center for Data Sciences.
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RE-SKILL YOUR RESUMÉ You know what they say about first impressions
Think of your resumé as the trailer to Your Career: The Movie. It gives an employer a glimpse of the kind of employee you’ll be, so you want it to accurately reflect the focus and determination you’ll bring to the job. A resumé is your initial sales tool to hook a company’s interest and make those potential employers want to learn more about you.
Great Resumé Content Includes…
• A summary or objective that serves as a snapshot of why you’re pursuing the job and what you bring to the table; • A list of core competencies and/or skills relevant to the job you’re pursuing; • Your work history, beginning with the most recent place of employment; • Your education history or recent coursework; • Side projects or volunteer experiences relevant to the job you’re pursuing; • Your LinkedIn and/or GitHub profile, personal website, or any link related to your field; • XYZ bullet approach, meaning, “I did X, using Y, which resulted in Z.”
Common Resumé Mistakes Include…
• Spelling and grammatical errors; • Inaccurate information (work history, dates, degrees, etc.); • Inconsistencies in format (font sizes, punctuation, caps, bold text, etc.); • Not tailoring your resumé to the job you’re seeking; • Photos—don’t include a photo of yourself (or anyone) on your resumé; • Too lengthy or too many bullet points—ideally, your resumé should be two pages or less; • Graphics, colors, and funky fonts—simple is still best in resumé formatting.
Source: Michael Bunch/ACDS
NAME SURNAME
Objective
Skills
Work Experience
Education
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE CODING In tech, soft skills can be the difference between success and failure
The tech industry is filled with processes, road maps, and wiring. It’s also full of people with the technical or “hard” skills that are important to getting the job done. But as industry insiders will tell you, technical knowledge is only half the picture. Soft skills are equally in demand, even if they’re underrated by many job seekers (to their detriment). Here are some of the most important of these skills in the IT workplace: 1. COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION Building tech with someone else or as part of a team makes for better applications and products. Effective communication is also crucial to explain how something works and to outline a solution, often to a non-tech client or audience. Effective communicators do not “dumb down” complex information, but are adept at making such concepts clear through common language, analogies, and adapting to their audience.
