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Over the past three years, the Indiana Office of Technology, which provides the IT infrastructure for the state of Indiana’s executive branch, has introduced two initiatives designed to improve its talent recruitment efforts.
In 2019, IOT, as the organization is known, found that its help-wanted ads were getting far fewer applicants than expected. Leaders didn’t know why.
The answer came later that year from Skillful Indiana, a not-for-profit initiative of the Markle Foundation whose goal is to enable all Americans—particularly those without a four-year college degree—to secure good jobs in a changing economy. Its research found that any tech agency whose help-wanted ads mandated a college degree was losing 70% of the applicant pool immediately.
So, in 2020, IOT dropped the degree requirement. The result? More applicants and quicker hiring times.
“Today’s IT needs are based on practical, tactical, hands-on activities and experience, and that doesn’t necessarily require the footprint of a four-year degree,” Chief Information Officer Tracy E. Barnes said. “The core expertise and activities that are needed to do a lot of the operation activities that our teams are looking for [are] a lot more about the technical skill and experience and aptitude than the overall footprint of a traditional college degree.”
Barnes said that, these days, with the proliferation of training programs, certification programs and other mechanisms to get hands-on experience, a degree is more about becoming a well-rounded individual who might have some expertise in areas like business or health.
The office still recruits from degree programs, including associate degrees.
“But we’ve just opened ourselves up to every possible lane of recruiting,” said Jon Rogers, director of strategic workforce planning and SEAL IT director. “It’s made our talent pool more robust.”
The second initiative, which started as a pilot in March 2020, is the State Earn and Learn (SEAL) IT Program, in which IOT hires people from various backgrounds and trains them to work in IT.
Modeled after a Department of Workforce Development Office of Work-Based Learning and Apprenticeships initiative to reskill adults into different trades, SEAL provides individuals the opportunity to get paid on the job while they learn relevant skills. The ideal result is to earn an industry-valued certificate through Ivy Tech Community College or another institution.
The program started with two people. In three years, 51 people have been hired through the program and 20 have graduated into full-time positions within IOT. These were people who had been driving trucks, working in restaurants and factories, even an arcade-machine technician, Rogers said. Today, they serve as vulnerability analysts, threat-penetration testers, cloud administrators and IT systems administrators for the state of Indiana.•
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