Like many Americans, Rafael Alvarado Jr. he lost his job at the height of the COVID pandemic. He began to think about what to do with the rest of his life.
That was in 2020, a year after the San Leandro native moved to Tracy, Calif., to live with his sister and family, who were priced out of the Bay Area. He had been working as a BMW technician and enjoyed working on cars. But he was also interested in computer science and dreamed of becoming a software engineer for a car company like Tesla. The only problem: He didn’t have an engineering degree and lacked mentors to help him along the way.
“My parents immigrated from Mexico in the late eighties. They didn’t speak English, and they didn’t have a career,” said Alvarado, 24. “They did multiple jobs raising us, and I didn’t want to fail them.”
These days, Alvarado is working toward a degree in computer science, part of a growing number of people who are honing their skills to become more attractive members of the workforce, especially in the technology field.
After the pandemic, the nature of work has changed and along with the rise of new technologies, the need for people with technical skills is only growing. In the Bay Area, where a single person earning $104,000 is considered low-income, retraining for a tech career is almost a necessity for an economically stable future. At the same time, companies need to invest in their workforce as technological innovation advances rapidly, but also creates skills gaps, experts say. Half of the global workforce will need upskilling by 2025 recent report by the states of the World Economic Forum.
“The job market is going to go through some huge changes, changes that people haven’t really noticed,” said Gautam Tambay, CEO and co-founder of Springboard, a workforce development company in San Francisco.
Tambay said he doesn’t think the tech workforce will shrink, but some of the jobs that exist today won’t exist in the future. And some jobs will materialize that do not exist today, requiring new skills. One example he gives is search engine optimization, or the practice of ranking a website at the top of a search engine’s results page, was something that didn’t exist 20 years ago, but today it does a massive industry.
According to the WEF’s 2020 The future of work report, the next 10 years will bring an influx of jobs in emerging professions such as generative AI, spatial computing, and quantum computing.
“Every time you’ve seen one of these massive revolutions, like the Internet revolution, it creates job growth, but there’s a different category of jobs,” Tambay said. “That’s why upskilling is so crucial. Short bursts of training can give you the skills you need to succeed in the job market of the future.”
Alvarado is improving by enrolling at Las Positas Community College in Livermore and began working part-time at the Amazon warehouse in Tracy in 2021. He has since earned his associate’s degree and is continuing his education at the company, prepaid by Amazon, taking classes taught by Springboard, one of the retail giant’s 35 education and training partners in California. He was recently promoted to IT Support Engineer for a transportation associate. Amazon declined to comment on his pay raise, but said the company has invested nearly $38 million in employee education initiatives in the state.
Critics of Big Tech, including Amazon, say the companies could offer front-line workers better wages and benefits when they start working. Amazon warehouse workers have it unionized en masse across the country, as have the workers GoogleMicrosoft and others.
Cleotilde Valenica, 55, works two jobs. She is full-time at a hospice clinic in Los Angeles. But the IT professional who moved permanently to the United States from El Salvador in 2019 after a 25-year career in technology is aiming to get back into the industry. He came to the United States on a scholarship in the mid-1980s and chose to return to El Salvador to finish his degree. There he worked as an IT professional in the banking sector. Now, she’s taking data analytics training, a benefit she’s eligible for as a part-time employee at the Amazon Go store in Woodland Hills.
“In computing, everything is new all the time,” Valencia said. “When I learned computer science, I was taught languages like Fortran, which are not so widely used anymore. If I want a good future, even after being in the workforce for so long, I have to keep learning.”
Christina Ortega, executive director of Mission Bit, a nonprofit that helps teenagers get tech training in San Francisco, said there is real concern among students and parents about their future in the city. The cost of living is high: the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,500, and it takes a full-time income of $61 an hour to comfortably pay rent, which is 3.5 times the city’s $16.99 minimum wage, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“I saw the amount of disruption that technology has caused over the years, my own family was pushed out of town” because of rising rent, Ortega said. “But that’s why it’s important to train and provide resources, access to our most vulnerable populations early on.”
The majority of high school students who take Mission Bit classes come from low-income Latino families. After struggling with an AP computer science course in high school, 17-year-old Rafel Perez started taking classes there. His older brother also advised him to go into the field because the latter had no exposure to computer science and STEM classes in high school.
Perez grew up in the Fillmore District with her mother and sister, and currently works three jobs to make ends meet. Her hard work is for good reason: she’s headed to the University of California, Irvine on full-ride scholarships and plans to major in computer science and Chicano studies. While college starts in the fall, he’ll be immersing himself in summer classes at UCI.
“I can’t wait,” Perez said. “I understand that technology is the future and I’m glad I was able to combine my passion with a professional career.”
Reach Shwanika Narayan: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @shwanika
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