Re-Skilling America and Making High Paying Tech Jobs Accessible to All Individuals and Communities - Ruben Harris // Founder and CEO of Career Karma

Disruptors for GOOD | Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprises

In this episode of the Disruptors for GOOD podcast, I speak with Ruben Harris, Founder and CEO of Career Karma, on using Software Development Bootcamps to re-skill America and make high paying tech jobs accessible to all individuals and communities.

Over the past couple of years, Ruben has worked with academics, organizers, politicians, and union leaders at Hustle, Honor and AltSchool focused on improving their personalized outreach, healthcare and education.

Ruben began his technology career working in Partnerships and Sales after writing a viral blog post called Breaking Into Startups about how moved to San Francisco without a job and landed a position 3 weeks later.

After receiving thousands of e-mails asking how to break into tech, Ruben Co-Founded the Breaking Into Startups Podcast to demystify the process, resulting in a social media reach of ~3 million people, 200,000+ downloads, 10,000+ website visits per month, over 100+ reviews on iTunes, a Facebook Community of 10,000+ people, and invitations to be a Contributor for TechCrunch and Black Enterprise.

Prior to working in tech, Ruben worked as an Investment Banker focused on Food, Consumer, and Retail companies in Chicago and Atlanta. As a member of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he recruited others to focus on issues related to food security, climate change, and agriculture.

Career Karma is a member of Y Combinator's 2019 class and since then has been helping people that want to become software engineers by matching them with the right coding bootcamp and supporting them throughout their careers. Hundreds of millions of people will need to change jobs in the coming years. Career Karma gives them a placement quiz and gets them accepted at coding bootcamps and other training programs. With income-sharing agreements growing in popularity, plenty of job skill providers will be willing to pay to enroll the highest potential students.

Another epic initiative by Ruben and his team is their current Reskill America campaign. Covid - 19 has left over 42 million Americans without jobs over the last few weeks — disproportionately impacting low - income communities, women, and people of color.