National Skills Coalition was mentioned in a Technical.ly story on equitable hiring practices. NSC research is cited to point out that half of black workers lack access to “vital digital skills”, which includes tech skills in the workplace that stray away from social media technology that many young people are fluent in. “The kids who took [digital creation app] Vine and ran with it were mostly African American teenagers,” NSC Senior fellow Amanda Bergson-Shilcock told Technical.ly. “It was created for anybody but it was mostly young Black teens and young adults. They had all this technical expertise, but if you put them in front of a computer and said swap rows for columns in Excel, [they couldn’t]. But it shows up as not having digital skills.”
Bergson-Shilcock also offers four solutions to bridge the digital skills gap:
