Jobs That Go Unfilled

Today I attended the monthly "Dixie Techs" meeting with like 80 other geeks, freaks and nerd-jocks. It's a luncheon from 12-1pm that takes place every first Friday of the month at Dixie State College of Utah. They always have a great speaker and you get free pizza too!

I found this networking event very intriguing. I noticed that every software, web and mobile app developer was hiring. A friend of mine is a computer science professor at DSC and he had a dozen business owners asking him who he had in his program that was graduating soon. These guys were salivating over computer science talent – they were even interested in kids who still had a year left in their undergrad. As I found out, there were not a lot of students in the computer science program.

Then this evening I came across this article about online ads for computer science jobs in Utah being up more than 15% in January. As I read on I learned that “while there are more than 25 job seekers for every open position in fields like construction, the exact inverse is true in technology, health and science-related jobs.”

My friend and I believe our First Lego League (FLL) program, which is a partnership through the University of Utah, Dixie State College of Utah and Utah State University (my  4-H Robotics Program) is a feeder program to these higher education institutions. The demand is so high right now for tech jobs, if you have a kid that is even moderately interested in techy stuff then I encourage you to help him or her find their inner geek and get them involved in Lego Robotics – it’s a great platform for youth to learn engineering, design, and programming.