By Kasia Kovacs
Kansas City Star
When President Barack Obama in March announced his federal TechHire initiative, a program meant to help fill the huge number of vacant technology jobs in the U.S., he honored bus driver turned computer programmer LaShana Lewis.
While growing up under the poverty line in East St. Louis, Ill., Lewis realized she had an interest in coding. She attended Michigan Technical University to study computer science, but she left after three and a half years — just before graduation — because she didn’t have the money. After that, she drove buses and worked at help desks.
“I had the skills,” Lewis said. “I had taken the programming classes. But I didn’t have a degree.”
Then she heard about LaunchCode, a two-year-old nonprofit organization that places apprentices with companies ranging from large corporations to small startups. It’s one program in a growing industry that equips people with tech skills in months, even weeks.