WIP-SXSW-EDU.png

WorkingNation @ SXSW EDU: Expanding Opportunities in Tech

A conversation from the Cognizant Foundation podcast stage at SXSW EDU with Maria Contreras, Sage Lee, and Kate Nichols
-

After two years virtual, SXSW EDU 2022 was back in person in Austin earlier this month!

It was an amazing four days of amazing conversations. By far, one of the most inspiring ones for me was the one I had on the Cognizant Foundation podcast stage with three women whose career paths have been changed by tech training programs that opened the doors for them in an industry that hasn’t always been the most welcoming to women.

Simply put: These women are amazing. These programs are amazing.

In this episode – which we recorded live in front of an enthusiastic audience – you’ll meet:

  • Kate Nichols – a 32-year-old former teacher who packed up her bags in Austin and moved to Seattle to learn software programming at Ada Developers Academy. She got a paid internship at Zulily as part of the training. She loves education still and has been able to combine that love with her new career at Hello World.
  • Sage Lee – a 26-year-old former retail food worker who went from stocking shelves to an intensive seven-month intensive software programming class in Denver’s Turing School. Today, after a paid apprenticeship at Handshake, she’s an associate junior programmer at the company. By the way, she went from barely making $40,000 to making more than $90,000 a year – that’s a big jump from her salary at the grocery store.
  • Maria Contreras – an Austin high school senior who started learning to code at 15 in a free Code2College afterschool program that landed her a paid internship at Indeed. We learned on stage that the now-18-year-old is headed to Rice University with a full scholarship to major in computer programming.

What these young women have in common is their desire to move into an in-demand career, and that they were able to find free, or almost free, training programs geared toward young people who don’t have the financial resources to do it on their own.

We talk about how they did it, and how you can do it too!

You can listen here – and I encourage you to listen all the way to the end – or you can download and listen from wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks to Kristen Titus, Hannah Lee, and Kyle Gunnels and all the Cognizant Foundation team for inviting us to record the podcast on their stage!

WorkingNation was a media partner with SXSW EDU for the fourth year in a row. Check out our interviews for our WorkingNation Overheard series for a flavor of the other conversations we had in Austin this year.

Episode 224: Expanding Opportunities in Tech at SXSW EDU
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0
Download the transcript for this podcast here.
You can check out all the other podcasts at this link:
Work in Progress podcasts

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.