Tech Talent Pipeline Residency at CUNY- College of Staten Island’s Post

Transcript

Sabine Salandy is the program manager for the tech talent pipeline at the College of Staten Island where she works directly with faculty and tech employers to bridge the gap between academia and industry. Welcome Sabine, great to have you. More about that program folks that are unfamiliar in the room. We're talking about the tech talent pipeline residency internship program which helps support paid internships, at CUNY in tech fields. And I want to ask a little bit about I've seen some of the data - we published a report very recently on the power of this is one of the programs supported by the CUNY2x initiative and with city dollars to actually support the internship, and what I've seen from the data is just incredibly impressive. In general in CUNY, only about 10 or so percent of students report ever having a paid internship & at CSI is better. But among students pursuing computer science degrees at CSI before benefiting from the residency internship program, about 1/3 of students I think had an internship since then. In 2022, I believe the latest figure was over 50%, and that's a big jump in two years and we've seen similar. I think a doubling of the number of students have actually gone on to land a tech job after graduation. So help me understand a little bit more what is it that's working about the programs under the TTP umbrella here at CSI. What, what do we need to know about what's working and how do we keep it going? The other thing that I think is important is that, you know, we are focused while we do tech training and we do Professional development, we are focused on that leading specifically to internships and full time jobs. And so to finish our program you have to get an internship and 95% of our students who complete the boot camp do get internships and the reason for that is our partnership with employers, right. Employers partner with us and they they give us feedback on our students performance and what they want to see from the candidates that they hire. And we take that learning and we integrate it into the curriculum and the boot camp and into professional development training so that we're filling those skill gaps And so students are more prepared for internships positions in those companies. And of course I mean as your report pointed out, you know that students with internships are three times more likely to get jobs And so we know that you know employees value interns you know they value internships. The type of internships, we make sure that they're project based internships. And students are working on projects that they can use their coding skills and be able to talk to us. We just need the students need more exposure to those people who are professionals so they can, you know, practice their networking skills, learn how to, you know, navigate those spaces confidently. I think we need more employers just to reach out to CUNY. The New York Jobs Council has provided that opportunity. Lauren Anderson at CUNY has provided that. Our students are still not targeted schools. So we're going against schools who are targeted. I I recently was at Bank of America, S&P, Ernst and Young and you know they're all telling me how wonderful our students are, but they don't come to our job fairs. They are not reaching out to Sabine immediately with a quality program, so I don't know what we have to do, what more we can do to let employers know that our students are quality, they're fantastic, and they're prepared. You know, they're getting jobs. A lot of our students are getting jobs out of New York, a lot in North Carolina. I'd rather have them stay in New York, but we can't do that because New York employers aren't coming to us. I just want to 2nd that it really does. So we've we've done 6 apprenticeship programs.