How to Fill the Tech Skills Gap

Hi, this is Lindy Kyzer with ClearanceJobs.com and today I am super excited to be talking with Vince Virga. He is the chairman and co-founder of SkillsStorm. And if you haven’t heard of SkillStorm yet, you should. They’re a really awesome company that’s helping to accelerate tech careers coming at the problem of finding, acquiring, and getting enough tech talent into careers from a few different angles, which I absolutely love. Certainly we have a major hiring push across the federal government and efforts to get more talent onboarded. So I think it’s a good time to be talking with SkillsStorm and learn a little bit more about what their mission is, what they do, and how they are helping to accelerate tech careers. So thank you so much Vince, for joining me to be on the show today.

Great to be here, Lindy. Thank you.

First just tell me a little bit about SkillsStorm from your vantage, because you do so many things, which obviously I love, but that can make it a little bit hard to know what your core mission is and what you’re doing. So for a listener who isn’t familiar with you, what kind of services and resources do you provide both to tech talent and also for employers in this space?

I think a good way to think about it, at the highest level, our mission is to really help create net new tech talent and bring it to the market at scale. So our purpose as an organization is to accelerate opportunity and for us that means to get our customers and to get our stormers further faster as a result of their relationship with SkillStorm. So I guess drilling down a little bit, you know, we are considered to be leaders in the design, build, deploy space. And so what that means is we custom design, build and deploy cohesive US-based tech teams, and then we deliver them at scale to our enterprise clients who are primarily the large global systems integrators and large federal systems integrators.

Okay. So you tied into my next question. You’re talking about federal systems integrators. Talk a bit about that. So federal agencies, how can your program help create a pipeline to help serve that current government talent shortage which we hear so much about.

Just to give you an example, a number of the large federal systems integrators are our clients. So we engage with them at a really strategic level, you know, pretty high in their organizations. And when they are competing for work or they’ve won work and they need to deliver, we’ll work with them on a strategy and try to forecast out for the next 12 to 24 months what their tech needs are gonna be. And then once we understand that, we, we essentially then work to build these teams at scale. So we’ll collaborate with our clients, we’ll get an in-depth understanding of their tech stack, we will build curriculum specifically to their tech stack, get use cases from them, get as much information as we can about their environment. Then we go about building the team. So we have pipelines of great talent coming in from the military, a lot of first generation college graduates as well.

(03:32)
We assess them for potential, we bring the best ones into our program, and then we train them specifically to our client’s tech stack where they’re in a three to four month immersive program. They get paid to train while they’re in the program, same pay rate as a full-time developer. So we’ve got a lot of skin in the game. It’s a very intense training. And they spend that three or four months, you know, learning everything about that organization and obviously learning the technology. When the program’s complete, then we deploy them as a contractor and they, they go to work for those clients.

That’s amazing. because it really hits on the pain points we see on both sides of this process. ClearanceJobs, we hear from candidates who say, ‘hey, we have all of this need. I got a certification or I have some degree of interest, but it’s not necessarily matched the opportunity.’ Same way with the companies on that side of it. ‘Hey, they have these needs,’ or they have this desire to upskill or re-skill their talent. And you kind of really help bridge that gap completely for those, both those companies and those candidates to help move them into those positions. Am I understanding that correctly?

That is correct. So there’s really two sides of our business. So the model I just explained to you, we call that our design build deploy. We sometimes refer to it as our next gen solution, like the next generation of talent. And that’s when we’re delivering these cohesive teams at scale. The other side of our business is an EdTech platform that we call Accelerator, and that’s where we provide upskilling, reskilling and corporate tech training services to our clients. We also do work in that regard for the federal government directly in terms of training and also, uh, a number of universities.

So talk a little bit about veterans, because I know veterans are a key demographic that we have in the cleared space and also looking to kind of onboard and move into a lot of these federal government positions and government contracting positions. We hear often, again, that pain point around, again, maybe they go out, they get a certification or they try to get some baseline skill, but they don’t necessarily know how to match it to an opportunity. I know Skill Storm has some very specific programs and opportunities for veterans. What do some of those look like?

Sure. Yeah. So it’s a very important part of what we do. It’s something that we’re really passionate about. I spent quite some time in government contracting, worked with a lot of ex-military members and you know, what we found was they had a, a lot of passion to continue serving the country in a certain way. And, you know, they would come out dedicated to the mission with really strong soft skills. And really we found if we can find somebody with pretty good technical acumen and really good soft skills, we can get them the technical skills that they need to succeed. So we have, for example, a contract with the Veterans Administration where we train transitioning service members. That’s with the VA, it’s called the Vet Tech Program. We’re one of only a few Vet Tech providers, so we only get paid to train those individuals if they get jobs.

(06:31)
And you know, that’s really an alignment with our mission. And there’s lots of great companies out there that do training, but then again, a lot of  them, they’re just happy to take the dollars for training and, and the outcomes aren’t necessarily there. Everything we do is, is based around outcomes. We also just rolled out a new program that we’re really excited about. We also do Army and Air Force COOL. Which is a, you know, really important part of our program in alignment with those programs. Any veteran that we train, we also offer a scholarship to their spouse or one of their dependents to get the same type of training. So that’s a couple examples of things that we’re doing to really help the veterans and their families make that transition into civilian life.

I love that. I love that scholarship for a spouse piece. I think that’s awesome that you do that. Again, the capacity to use those COOL credits to get some credentialing while you’re still in the service or as you’re transitioning is super important. And again, how you tie it to a position or a job. So maybe speak to that a little bit further. For veterans who are coming and doing some of these programs, will they have the opportunity through SkillStorm to actually interact with employers as they’re kind of offboarding from training? Or how does some of that matchmaking piece of it happen on that side of it?

Yeah, a hundred percent. So there’s a couple different avenues they can take. Upon graduation from one of our programs, we have an entire team that is dedicated to building relationships with employers that are hiring at scale. And so we work with those companies and make sure that the veterans have a home once they’re trained, but also a lot of them we end up hiring and bringing into our more intense last mile training that I was describing earlier. We put them on a pathway there to actually work with SkillsStorm. So, there’s a couple different ways that we do that.

Awesome. And every time I turn around, it seems like you have a new university partnership. So talk about those university partnerships. What do those look like and how does partnering with universities tie into your strategy for accelerating tech opportunity?

Accelerating is a great word. We call it our accelerator program. And colleges and universities do a great job of getting some of the sort of high level skills and the concepts to help the students understand those types of things. They’re not all really great at training them to use the specific tools that are really prominent in industry today. That’s kind of where we pick up the ball and run with it from there. So they use our online accelerator program where people can get certified in cloud cyber, full stack and AI technologies with all the technology vendors that you’re familiar with: AWSs, Salesforce, ServiceNow. There’s a bunch of them on there. The universities partner with us and they white label our platform and use it as part of their continuing education program. So it gives their students, alumni, and extended network access to those skills. And for us, again, that’s great because that gives us a pipeline of individuals that we can then bring into our design build deploy program.

I like that piece because I have a lot of non-traditional degree background folks who could consider adding some of those basic STEM tech skills. Because I feel like my Rolodex is growing with attorneys who now work in cyber and humanities majors, and a lot of folks who didn’t have a degree background that necessarily screamed, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be a kick butt developer,’ but clearly had the brain and capacity for it and could layer on something like what you’re doing with SkillStorm and really advance their career a lot further.

Yeah, we see that a lot. I mean, we’ve had music majors, history majors. I think part of it is because, you know, there is so much free information available out there where people can become, you know, somewhat competent on their own and in various technologies. But again, kind of getting that last mile real world training and then getting connected with a job, that’s the tough part, especially if they don’t have a computer science degree. But about 25% of the people that we work with don’t have any kind of technical degree at all. So we’ve been very successful in helping people that want to break into the tech world be able to do that and they turn out to be some of our best employees.

I love that too. And I think it ties into, I know OPM announced last month that they were doing some updates and hopefully opening up federal job opportunities, specifically saying, Hey, even if you don’t have all of the degree requirements, all of the check the block criteria, which can really seem like a, a big piece of what it takes to get into federal government employment. If you have the skills and you can demonstrate the skills through something like a certification or training that was obtained through a partnership like SkillStorm, that’s key. And I think the only way we’re gonna meet the federal job requirements that we have now in the openings is if we have more avenues and unique avenues to getting folks onboarded and into those positions.

Yeah, I I mean I think you hit on something that’s really critical. So I think there’s a couple things going on right now, sort of secular trends that I would like to see continue to gain momentum. One of them is what you just alluded to, which is skills-based hiring. I think there’s been four or five states in the last several months that have eliminated degree requirements for a of their technical jobs. And you’re hearing a lot of companies within industry starting to talk about that and, and take steps in that direction. And on the other side of the equation, I’m a big proponent of higher ed and owe a lot to the University of Central Florida where I went. But not everybody has access to a college education. And unfortunately that seems to becoming more and more expensive.

(12:17)
So, you know, we sort of look at ourselves as potentially being that connective tissue that can provide alternative pathways to these types of jobs because I don’t look at it as an either or thing. It’s not like we’re gonna be putting universities out of business, but we need more bright minds working on these things. I mean, look at any one of these skill sets between cyber and cloud and now AI. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs that are open right now. I don’t know if we ever talked about this before, Lindy, but each year in this country we graduate 4 million people with various degrees. Only 70,000 of them have computer science or related degrees. And that number hasn’t really changed in about a decade and a half. And by the way, about half of that 70,000 ends up being underemployed with low level tech support jobs or not in tech at all, just because they didn’t get that very specific training and they didn’t get connected to a job with a great company.

(13:15)
So, that’s a big part of our vision for the future is to start to, you engage earlier in the sort of supply chain, engaging people in their younger years and giving them the tools and putting them on a pathway to where they can access those types of jobs in the future.

Yeah, I think that’s a critical piece of it, and that’s what I love to see with SkillStorm and what you’re doing. because it’s not just, Hey, you only need certifications. You don’t need a college degree. I mean, you have, university partnerships because you know, there’s a lot of folks coming out of those programs that need that. We know, again, applying the skills to veteran talent is a key part of it, especially for the defense industry where they rely on those folks who have security clearances to come in. But when you have that many job openings and gaps, you’re just not going to fill it by having a one size fits all talent solution. And that’s just not the job market that we look at today. Folks are not taking the linear year career paths that they used to and even staying with a single employer for that long. So we kind of have to create avenues for career change and transfer and skills transfer.

A hundred percent. I mean, there’s tons of people out there with the potential and desire to do it. And there’s a number of other companies that are also working on a lot of creative solutions in this area and we need that, right? I mean, obviously our audience here is, you know, gonna be involved maybe at some level with, with government contracting, and not to overdramatize it but in some ways it certainly is a national security threat when you’re talking about cyber. And with AI coming in and the frequency and sophistication of attacks that we’re going to be seeing, it’s hard to predict. You can imagine it’s going to, you know, become pretty severe and, you know, the way I look at it, it’s not, we’re not really necessarily engaged in an arms race, you know, when it comes to cyber, but it is a brains race, right? We’re gonna need more and more smart people working on these kinds of problems.

Absolutely. I think every day at ClearanceJobs, covering something related to a new ransomware attack. It affects company bottom lines whether you’re federal government or private sector, wherever you’re at. If you don’t have qualified competent cyber skills and cyber talent, you’re absolutely vulnerable. And I think the government has done a decent job about educating on that. A lot of companies who aren’t even in the DIB who don’t even, who aren’t even serving the government as a primary customer, need to have really robust cyber protections just because everybody has some kind of data that some adversary is definitely trying to get.

And there’s some new guidelines that are coming from the federal government in regards to cyber. So even a lot of companies in the private sector, how they were doing business and sending a lot of their work offshore, they’re not gonna be able to send as much offshore anymore, which again, is going to put even a bigger strain on the talent supply that we have here in the states.

And last but not least, I wanna talk about your partnership with ClearanceJobs. That’s obviously a big part of it. The conversation when we’re talking with folks, you know, we have, there’ve been a lot of movement and layoffs across the broader tech space. So we’ve had a lot of folks say, Hey, you know, what are you talking about with the talent shortage? We have all of this tech talent that’s on the move. A key piece of that is you have to have the security clearance to work in a lot of those positions. So I love this where, ClearanceJobs, we kind of have this key demographic where we’re reaching out to clear talent. SkillStorm obviously has a lot going on, working with veteran talent and onboarding other folks in the capacity to help them get cleared. So talk a little bit more about your support of cleared talent specifically and maybe your partnership with ClearanceJobs.

So extremely excited to be partnering with you guys. I think you hit the nail on the head, obviously, in the federal space, clearances are often required and we believe that there’s a faster path to getting these roles filled if you have somebody with the clearance and you can get them to technical skills, versus you have somebody with the technical skills, and then by the time you get them to clearance, oftentimes it, it just doesn’t happen fast enough. So you guys have such a massive reach in the space. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for the users of your platform. You know, when they’re looking at opportunities and they might not have the exact match in terms of their skillset,  they can engage with SkillStorm, we can help upskill them and train them, get them those certifications to help them qualify for, you know, other types of roles that, that they’re interested in and, and advancing their career. Again, I think it’s a, it’s a great opportunity, you know, for your users and got a lot of traction and, we hope to see more and more people taking advantage of it.

Absolutely. I’ll post a link in the show notes, but you can definitely visit ClearanceJobs.com. There’s a link there to that SkillStorm partnership or go to SkillStorm.com or visit ClearanceJobs.com to learn more about our partnership with Skills Storm. Again, thanks so much, Vince, for being on the show today. I appreciate it.

And Lindy, if anybody wants to reach out to me directly, they can feel free to shoot me an email at vince@skillsstorm.com.