Asnat Ghebremedhin

LinkedIn revealed earlier this year that a person is nine times more likely to get a job through a referral . The obvious question is if someone doesn’t have a big professional network, how can they break into getting a middle class job? A lack of social capital becomes a burden for job applicants who feel they have done everything “right” in their journey, yet struggle to secure a career opportunity. Thankfully there are programs whose purpose is to help people build professional networks, and learn technical and soft skills to get a great job. Climb Hire — founded by Nitzan Pelman in 2019 — is one of them. The Bay Area-based non-for-profit startup — funded by Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google — creates economic opportunity for hidden talent. They train people to become Salesforce administrators . Salesforce is a massive $16 billion company and according to the IDC , they are projecting over 3.3 million new jobs will be created by the end of 2022. Gaining technical skills is an...

A decade ago, President Barack Obama first stepped into the Oval office and mandated the Open Government Initiative with a memorandum calling for transparency, participation, and collaboration of information from the Federal Government to the public. Now if it’s hard to wrap your mind around the concept of government and transparency altogether, let alone the other two principles, you’re not alone. This is where Open Data , a school of thought that some information ought to be available to the public without cost or copyright restrictions, comes into discussion in the United States. Although not the first push for public access to information in the U.S., (see: Freedom of Information Act of 1966 , Privacy Act Amendments of 1974 , Open Government Act of 2007 ), the scale of data collected and made available online over the past decade is unprecedented. So What Data Do They Have? The datasets represent information managed from various departments across Federal agencies and also pulls...