In today’s world, technical skills, like programming, open up amazing new opportunities. But there’s a problem. Typically, it’s been too expensive for the majority of people to get access to education that teaches the technical skills that are so in-demand today.

In 2015, President Obama launched the TechHire Initiative, a $150M government program aimed to help solve this problem. The program aims to help young people and disadvantaged groups find jobs in the emerging technical economy.

Today, we’re so excited to announce that we’ve been selected by the Obama Administration as an official TechHire Partner for 2017 to give over $1 million dollars in scholarships to help break down the barriers to quality technical education and fix tech’s diversity problem.

The White House selected the best coding bootcamps in the nation based on 3 key criteria:

• Data-driven and innovative hiring practices to expand openness to non-traditional hiring
• Models for training that prepare students in months, not years
• Active local leadership to connect people to jobs that have ramp-up programs. 

As one of only 30 coding bootcamps selected by the White House, we’re humbled to have our unique educational approach validated for such an important cause.

We firmly believe in the power of the bootcamp model to generate amazing developers and launch new careers in technology. Bootcamps provide a way for motivated people to change course, develop new skills, and transition to an incredibly rewarding and in-demand career track.

Unfortunately, there are far too many coding bootcamps that either don’t know how to teach or simply don’t care enough to do a quality job. We’re honored to be selected as one of the most credible bootcamps in the country, and we’re looking forward to bringing an amazing software engineering education to more people.

Here’s how the partnership will work.

We’ll kick start the program by giving 50 aspiring developers from underrepresented and minority groups in the Los Angeles area the technical skills to completely change their lives by the middle of 2017. We’re partnering with the Youth Policy Institute, an amazing non-profit with deep roots in LA, to find these talented people. We’re in good hands. YPI is the only non-profit in the country to receive all three signature White House Revitalization Initiative grants under President Obama: Promise Neighborhood, Choice Neighborhood, and Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation.

We’ll then iterate on our program and train hundreds of additional students through the rest of 2017 and beyond.

Each student will get:

• Free tuition
• Our entire online learning platform with 900+ hours of the best coding curriculum on the planet
• Consistent 1-on-1 mentor sessions from senior developers with experience at places like Paypal, Yahoo, eBay, Shopify, ProductHunt and startups
• Custom help through our tech forum, office hours and chat channels, so getting stuck is a thing of the past
• Lifetime access to our coding platform and a massive online learning resource

At Firehose, we believe in using the power of code to change people’s lives.

It’s why we partnered with Refugees on Rails to bring our software engineering education to thousands of refugees. And it’s why sought out the TechHire partnership as well.

Companies need people who can code. This is truer now more than ever. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the number of Software Developer jobs to grow around 17% through 2024, which is much faster than the average growth across all professions.  

Every industry is becoming reliant on technology. We all know that Facebook and Uber need developers to build their products. But so does almost every other type of company:

• Media companies, like the Huffington Post, need developers to build tech stacks that allow them to publish a ton of content at scale.
• Universities, like Harvard, need developers to build libraries of digital knowledge.
• Wearable companies, like Fitbit, need developers to write the software needed for them to work
• Even Ford needs a ton of software engineers. Just take a look at the open positions on their site.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t have 4 years and $200,000 to get an education that will help them land one of the many open developer jobs.

In the technology age, better skills lead to better opportunities. But in many ways, traditional education hasn’t done such a great job at providing relevant skills to deserving people.

Quality online education democratizes the spread of knowledge. It creates new pathways to better jobs and opportunities and opens up the possibility to learn amazing things to anyone with a connection to the internet.

That’s our mission.

We’re reinventing education in order to help more driven people move the world forward.

We couldn’t be more excited to get this TechHire partnership off the ground and make it even better as we go.