Tech Jobs Tour, a traveling job tour with the goal of recruiting women, people of color and LGBTQ people into the tech field, has announced that they will be making a stop in Phoenix in the near future. The fair will be held in downtown Phoenix, but the exact location is yet to be announced.
The tour typically kicks off with a “speed mentoring” session. The rest of the night features guest speakers, more mentoring sessions, and a coding boot camp showcase. Mentoring sessions will pair professionals with job seekers, with a focus on the software development and design, QA, data science and product management fields. Participants are asked about their skills when registering, which helps organizers make good matches.
The job fair portion of the event has featured many big-name companies, including Amazon, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, SpaceX, Twitter and many more. Positions that recruiters are looking to fill include front and back-end developers, graphic designers, tech journalists, IT professionals, programmers, marketers and more. Full lists of past companies and positions can be found on the registration page. Interested job seekers can upload resumes to the website to see possible matches with companies whether or not they attend the job fair.
Tech Jobs Tour states on its website that there are over 500,000 open tech jobs, and by 2020 there will be over one million. The group also points out that over 60 percent of those new to the field of engineering, coding and data science come from boot camps and vocational schools rather than four-year programs at universities and colleges. The Tour aims to help match up women, people of color and LGBTQ people first with the appropriate learning programs, and then their dreams jobs in tech. By facilitating this pipeline, the Tour hopes to increase representation in technology and get people the “jobs they deserve.”
Tech Jobs Tour partners with the company Include.io to drive this push for diversity. Include.io is a platform that helps employers gain better representation in their companies by allowing them to search for candidates using opt-in diversity data and by organizing mini-mentoring sessions for employees. Another Tech Jobs Tour partner is Lesbians Who Tech, a group of over 25,000 “queer women and allies in tech,” that also aims to increase representation in the industry. All three organizations were founded and are led by Leanne Pittsford, a San Diego-based entrepreneur.
The Phoenix Tech Jobs Tour is free, and interested job seekers can register here. Lesbians Who Tech has also hosted events in Phoenix and future meetups will be posted here.
The tour was originally supposed to come to town at the end of March, but the date is being changed in order to allow for more preparation time. Check their website frequently for more updates.
