Hiring problems in Miami tech? A key player in the community has advice for everyone
For seven years, BrainStation Miami — the new name for Wyncode following the stalwart Miami coding bootcamp’s purchase by the New York-based digital education giant earlier this year — has been boosting the careers of hundreds of South Florida professionals.
We caught up with Wyncode co-founder Johanna Mikkola, now BrainStation Vice President & General Manager for Miami, to hear her thoughts about local tech job creation. It’s a topic Tech Trail has been covering in recent weeks.
For all the talk of high-paying tech jobs promised by newly arrived firms, only a fraction have materialized. Furthermore, the jobs that are being created are not necessarily going to locals. Thanks to the remote-working revolution brought on by the COVID pandemic, there is now an infinite labor pool from which to draw from that may be penalizing Miami-based workers.
Mikkola says BrainStation continues to see steady hiring among its graduates — with at least one cohort, from February, having achieved 100% job placement of job seekers.
Yet she acknowledged challenges remain.
“There’s not enough intentionality being put into access and equity to make this a truly unique ecosystem,” Mikkola said.
To that end, BrainStation Miami announced last week it is creating full scholarships worth $15,000. Working alongside CareerSource South Florida, eligible students will be placed in BrainStation’s Full Stack Web Development and UX/UI Immersive bootcamps, which prepare graduates for careers in two fast-growing and high-paying tech fields.
Miami’s fate, Mikkola said, is not necessarily destined to be that of San Francisco’s, which has seen tech swallow its economy whole, creating gulfs between haves and have-nots.
But there remain questions about the direction of Miami’s tech movement.
“We have no idea about what future of ‘hashtag MiamiTech’ is,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to have this conversation.”
A transcript of our conversation follows.
Where are Brainstation Miami grads getting hired?
Both national and local companies are hiring. The companies locally that are hiring are people who have worked with us for a longer period of time — they have built a pipeline of juniors (a recent graduate with limited experience) and have created a way to onboard juniors.
A really great example is Papa: 15 percent their engineering team are our grads.
Companies like Papa, Watsco, REEF, MDLive, — they need more tech talent than we can provide them, so they’ve created a pipeline. At the enterprise-level, we work with companies like Royal Caribbean and Deloitte.
At Brainstation, we’re not only trying to help individuals, we’re also trying to help companies create these hiring pathways. They engage with us — it’s not rocket science. They engage with us by doing interview days. We tee it up, we engage them by having them in as a speaker...It’s a relationship. We send resumes to our top partners — so sometimes it’s as easy as just opening up an email.
What is one way a company can overcome the challenge of hiring someone with less ready-made experience?
Hire for attributes instead of a hard skill set. Everyone wants to hire people with high-growth-startup experience, and yes, maybe people in South Florida may not have that. But the question then becomes what are the attributes they do have that you could hire for — the work ethic, hustle; the key attributes that parallel workers who have been in high-growth startups. And then, once you identify those people, nurture them. The companies that hire juniors successfully are good at doing that: Not necessarily hiring for a hard skill set, but for a certain type of person.
What can juniors do to better position themselves to be hired?
Sometimes juniors are applying to very big organizations, so they’re not going to hear back, because they are so bombarded. It’s why we say it’s so important to think about the network you’re building. You’re going to have to jump through a lot of hoops if you’re a junior. You’re going to have to do more work to prove yourself, even if the demand for talent now is gangbusters. They should be attending Miami tech events. It’s about persistence and saying, ‘Are you sure?’ And sometimes it’s just a matter of luck.
What would you say to someone who knows there are tons of opportunities in tech but is intimidated by making the (career) switch?
It might seem overwhelming right now — tech is everything, everywhere, how do I insert myself into this network?
A great way is to attend one of our events, from there go to one of our workshops and try some UX design, try some coding. The most structured pathway we have is attending a diploma program, which takes you from zero to a technology career.
For us, it’s been encouraging — the backgrounds of some of our graduates are like hostess, mechanic, attorney, doctor. The unifying thing is a desire to pivot their career into technology and wanting to do something fulfilling financially and from intellectual stimulation standpoint, or needing to reinvent yourself. It’s pretty obvious that doing anything in the tech sector is pretty beneficial right now, the key is to be relevant professionally, and to be relevant means having a digital skill set.
Papa latest billion-dollar company
Papa, the family-on-demand service that provides “pals” for older adults and other individuals as a form of care, has raised $150 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 at a $1.4 billion valuation.
“The collective physical, social, and emotional benefits of this companionship are vast, and the opportunity to reduce loneliness and to support health where it happens — at home — is boundless,” said founder and CEO Andrew Parker in a statement.
By Tech Trail’s count, Papa becomes the eighth South Florida company to achieve unicorn status in the past 12 months. The others, in chronological order, are: ghost kitchen group REEF; Manny Medina’s Cyxtera and Appgate cyber companies; Boca Raton-based building materials supplier Material Bank; Maurice R. Ferré’s surgery tech group, Memic; software platform Pipe; and augmented reality company Magic Leap.
Wells Fargo, StartUp FIU grant for 1,000 businesses
Wells Fargo announced a $750,000 Open for Business Fund grant to FIU to launch a virtual platform at StartUP FIU Food, the small business incubator serving food and beverage micro-entrepreneurs in South Florida.The goal is to offer online resources to more than 1,000 small businesses to help them recover and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sensie stress app finalist in int’l competition
Sensie, a Miami-based app designed to measure and treat stress, was named one of nine finalists out of 550 startups in the Singapore Airlines App Challenge 2021, the top digital challenge platform in the travel and aviation industry. Sensie was selected as “an innovative solution with strong potential to help pilots assess and take care of their mental health in a personalized and confidential manner,” according to a release. More info at sensie.app.
FIU offering paid internships with Microsoft, others
On Tuesday, FIU will hold an event to connect students with paid “micro” internships and mentorship from Microsoft, top Miami companies and featured alumni. Co-sponsored with Miami’s Shrimp Society local networking group and Miami-based “The Human Cloud” author Matthew R. Mottola, students seeking work will get the chance to connect with firms with immediate job needs. More info at eventbrite.co.uk.
Clarification: The introduction to the interview with Johanna Mikkola, co-founder of Wyncode, has been edited to reflect that 100% of its “job seekers” found work in February and the transcript of the interview has been revised to show that 15%, not half, of the coding school’s grads are employed by Papa.
This story was originally published November 7, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
