Employers now responsible for reskilling as ‘learn to code’ era ends

When Rider Rodriguez launched Code Louisville 13 years ago, he always expected the tech skills program would eventually shut down. He just never imagined it would end this way.

Partially funded by the Louisville Metro Government and grants, Code Louisville was designed to prepare local residents for tech jobs through a free, flexible, six-month curriculum covering web development, software development, and UX design. The initiative aimed to boost the local tech talent pool, driving economic growth for the Kentuckiana region.

“We had an under-representation, relatively speaking, for those good-paying [tech] jobs,” Rodriguez told ZDNET. The thinking was, “Why not us? Let’s see what we can do for people.”

At its height, the program enrolled cohorts of up to 300 students. Roughly 1,400 graduates found employment against projections of around 2,000 open tech sector roles in the city. It was one of many nationwide programs created to fast-track Americans into well-paying tech jobs during a period of surging demand.

But in August, Code Louisville (which later expanded statewide as Code:You) will close, citing a decline in job placement. The reason is not, as Rodriguez initially envisioned, that tech skills have become so widespread that specialized training programs are unnecessary.

“There was no shortage of interest from job seekers looking for training; it was just the jobs that were available to entry-level people in the field that seemed to have dried up,” said Code:You Program Director Brian Luerman, who succeeded Rodriguez.

The closure of Code Louisville highlights just how dramatically and quickly the demand for tech talent has shifted. It also forces both companies and job seekers to rethink their approach to reskilling.

A new reality

One of the toughest aspects of the current moment is the unpredictability of the job landscape. A report from Forrester estimates that AI will replace about 6% of jobs by 2030. Others, like the World Economic Forum, suggest AI will create more jobs than it eliminates, but only if businesses invest in their workers.

Meanwhile, headlines about layoffs are hard to ignore, even if those cuts can’t be directly blamed on the AI boom.

“The tech revolution has unfolded faster than what people anticipated, and it is likely to speed up even more in the future,” said Darrell West, senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. “People need to be humble about their predictions, because things that we may think we need five years from now may no longer be true.”

About a decade ago, the future of tech jobs seemed secure. In 2015, the Obama administration launched the TechHire Initiative, aimed at filling the projected half a million IT jobs that would be sitting open by 2020.

The effort involved partnerships with organizations like tech skills nonprofits and for-profit coding bootcamps. Advocates encouraged companies to consider hiring candidates with less formal training and from nontraditional backgrounds. The push also had a strong social justice component, promoting the inclusion of women and people of color in this bright, shiny tech future.

In the most idealistic terms, tech jobs offered a near-surefire entry into the middle class, and the tech industry needed as many bodies as possible to maintain a global competitive advantage.

That’s no longer the case.

“No one has a crystal ball for exactly how all of this is going to play out with AI,” said Julie Bedard, managing director and partner at the Boston Consulting Group. “It’s like a real-time experiment to say, as we integrate AI into the work, what happens to jobs, skills, team size, career trajectories?”

Reskilling in a new era

For what West described as the “more enlightened companies,” part of the answer is to take their existing workforces and retrain them to handle a new reality that could include AI-enhanced workflows, agents, and more.

A report from the World Economic Forum found that 77% of employers globally plan to upskill their workers. Another report from Deloitte explained that “insufficient worker skills” are the biggest hurdle for companies integrating AI into their workflows. The main approach for correcting the issue is education.

The rise of internal training shows how much the burden of reskilling has shifted from individuals to companies.

And, whereas the TechHire era offered a relatively straightforward path (learn full stack, perhaps, and get a job), a broad and basic fluency with AI tools may not be enough.

Bedard said reskilling employees isn’t just about teaching a specific skill. It’s about instilling the mindset to adapt when those skills change in six months. Increasingly, that adaptability is a quality companies are looking for among job candidates.

However, many companies lack a thorough understanding of their current or near-future talent needs.

That lack of understanding is a major roadblock because, as BCG explains, the AI transformation is a workforce transformation.

“We say it’s 10 or 20% about the data and algorithms, and it’s 70% about the people in the processes,” Bedard said.

What’s more, reskilling within companies doesn’t necessarily prevent layoffs. The World Economic Forum report also found that 41% of employers plan to shrink their workforces because of AI.

In an earnings call last year, Accenture’s CEO said the consultancy would cut staff who couldn’t be reskilled to use AI, and also noted the company had already reskilled more than half a million workers.

Or in the case of Verizon last year, the telco set up a $20 million reskilling fund for “departing” employees after a round of 13,000 layoffs. The fund offers a variety of certifications and digital skills training, as well as career coaching.

Lessons from the TechHire years

When looking back at the reskilling efforts of the last decade, workforce experts flag a few important lessons.

For one, entry-level roles still matter, even if they seem the most endangered.

Survey data from the Graduate Management Admission Council found that a third of employers have already replaced some entry-level positions with AI, illustrating a fear that it’s going to be increasingly difficult for people to even start their careers.

But Code:You’s Luerman is concerned that focusing on more senior-level roles without replenishing the pipeline will create a skills gap in the future.

West pointed out there’s a retirement wave happening.

“We still will need humans to oversee the robots and make sure the automated tools are performing the way that we want, and so companies need to make sure that they’re training people for the skills that they’re going to need in the future,” he said.

Some tech leaders understand. Earlier in the year, IBM said it would triple hiring for entry-level roles while readjusting what those roles actually entail.

“If we don’t continue to invest in entry-level hires, what happens in 3 to 5 years?” said IBM Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux in a blog post. The blog post also described how an entry-level developer might start working with clients earlier in their career instead of tackling documentation or basic coding.

Another lesson comes from Ruthe Farmer, who served as a senior adviser for Tech Inclusion under the Obama administration and now runs the Last Mile Education Fund. She described it as the price of participation. During the TechHire years, although programs like coding bootcamps promised expedited paths to employment, many of them cost thousands of dollars and required full-time study for several months.

“One thing I think we should be very aware of as we’re building these new initiatives is recognizing a lot of the focus on the prior efforts was let’s increase access and let’s increase awareness,” Farmer said. “That is true, but the price of participation is still too high for the very people who need it the most,” she said.

At the end of June, a nonprofit called Raise Us launched, bringing together both Democratic and Republican governors from several states to tackle AI job loss. The organization focuses on employer coalitions, education and training, and policy, with a particular aim at the state level.

As reported by the New York Times, one policy initiative includes wage insurance for workers who take lower-paying jobs instead of leaving the job market.

Among the companies backing Raise Us are OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Autodesk, IBM, and AMD. As the Times pointed out, several of these companies have already laid off workers in the name of AI.

In any case, West explained that any effective retraining program needs to be tuned into what skills employers actually need, and those companies need to be invested in the programs.

“The key for retraining programs is actually putting people in jobs,” he said.

Legacy program

Back in Kentucky, Luerman and the various mentors who volunteer with Code:You are trying to be direct with this final class.

“Everybody sees what’s going on in the news and their own job searches and from talking with us and their fellow students and their mentors in the program,” he said. “The tech economy is just not in a great spot right now in the United States, and particularly in Kentucky.”

The program has been emphasizing how these tech skills can be complementary in other fields.

“You may not be making the total shift from nurse to software developer, but maybe you can find a technology job within the healthcare system that you work to combine those skills,” he said.

Luerman said he’s reminded of the value of community. He hopes that those building the tech of the future remember that much of it stands on the culture among folks like software developers who shared and documented untold lines of code, posted problems, and collaborated.

It is also that same spirit that saw several hundred volunteers serve as mentors for Code:You over the years.

“I hope that’s our legacy,” Luerman said, “that it brought a community together to uplift people in the tech field.”