It's Your Business: Code/IT Academy expands across Indiana Uplands area

Pat East
·4 min read

Three years ago, the city of Bloomington saw the urgency of expanding the digital economy to benefit more citizens and invested $100,000 of Recover Forward funding to start Code/IT Academy. This new program was designed to provide free training in high-demand tech skills, to help residents access higher-paying jobs and to grow Indiana’s tech talent pool. Now, over the next three years, thanks to a $1.37 million grant from the Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative (READI), we can expand the program across 10 Indiana Uplands counties.

Code/IT Academy is a partnership between The Mill, Regional Opportunity Initiatives (ROI), and Ivy Tech Community College. Code/IT’s 10 weeks of free training prepares individuals for certifications and jobs in areas such as web development, IT administration, CompTIA Security+, and Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner. Ivy Tech instructors teach three sessions of Code/IT a year on a variety of in-demand topics. Participants join study groups and hone soft skills, and receive career coaching through the Ivy+ Career Link program.

Increasing digital equity has been an intentional goal of our program from its outset. Of the spring 2023 Bloomington participants, 80% identify as belonging to a group underrepresented in tech, and 50% do not have a college degree. Across all sessions to date, over half identify as women, and over 30% identify as belonging to a minority group.

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By the end of this year, nearly 300 people will have gone through Code/IT Academy. On July 11, we’ll start streaming to Washington and Crawford counties in our summer session on web development. In 2024, we’ll expand to Daviess, Dubois and Orange counties. In 2025, we’ll reach Lawrence, Greene, Martin, Brown, and Owen counties. Sessions will be live-streamed to satellite county locations with on-site facilitators. In-person options will be available to those in close proximity to The Mill.

This gradual expansion allows us to ramp up the program while ensuring a responsive approach. By 2025, our goal is to upscale 500 Hoosiers every year through Code/IT Academy. It’s a significant impact from a program that initially started with only 20 or 30 participants.

Grant funds were awarded by the Indiana Uplands READI Steering Committee, ROI Board of Directors, and the Indiana Economic Development Corp. (IEDC). Grant funds will cover hiring on-site facilitators at Code/IT Academy’s new locations, pay for certification exams and improve career support. Being able to cover certification exams is critical to ensure our outcomes. This certification is what enables folks to access new careers, and it’s expensive. CompTIA Security+ exam voucher costs $370, and not everyone passes on their first try.

To further improve our outcomes, we’ve also hired Michelle Cole, who is serves on The Mill’s board of directors and is a former technology executive for Envisage, as a consultant focused on employer recruitment. This area is where we need to make the most progress. We excel at finding and enrolling students and have a high graduation rate, but we need to focus on improving job placement. Although we currently place more people than before, we want to further enhance our efforts. READI grant money can help us provide more robust support to change that. We’re working with Ivy+ Career Link to partner students with career coaches and prepare them to interview successfully. We’re also working to better position the curriculum to align with opportunities.

We’d like to thank the IEDC, ROI, Tina Peterson and Michi McClaine, and everyone at the Community Foundation of Bloomington Monroe County for this opportunity. Thank you to city of Bloomington for getting us started in 2020, and for continuing to support the program last year with federal ARPA funds. Duke Energy also provided essential grant funding while we honed our program, as did the BUEA, Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association.

Finally, huge thanks to our partners at Ivy Tech, especially Adam Gross and the instructors we’ve worked with, especially Jason Endris. We couldn’t run Code/IT Academy without them.

Residents of Monroe, Washington, and Crawford counties can sign up here to be notified when enrollment opens for new sessions. To learn more about Code/IT Academy, visit https://codeitacademy.org/ .

Pat East is executive director of The Mill in Bloomington.
Pat East is executive director of The Mill in Bloomington.

Pat East is executive director of The Mill, a nonprofit entrepreneurship center on a mission to launch and accelerate startups, and ultimately to become Indiana’s center of gravity for entrepreneurship.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bloomington's Code/IT Academy expands across 10 Indiana counties