Digital Skills: ‘It’s About the Future of the Workforce’

Brown: It can be easy to assume that everyone has access to the internet in today's digital age, but about one in five American households are not connected. Hello, I'm Dara Brown, and this is "Getting Connected", powered by Comcast Newsmakers. We're on location at the Net Inclusion 2024 Conference in Philadelphia. Joining me to share efforts to provide technology access and education to under-resourced youth and their communities is Megan Steckly. She's the CEO of Compudopt. Megan, thanks so much for being here.

Steckly: My pleasure, thank you for having us.

Brown: So how does the digital divide affect the younger generation and their families?

Steckly: Yeah, so I think everybody's immediate go-to is distance learning, right? We learned that through COVID. But really the impact goes well beyond that, right? It's about the future of workforce and what they're going to do when they grow up, with technology jobs being the fastest growing employment market. And also, you know, a sense of belonging. Kids connect over video games and being YouTube stars.

Brown: And how is Compudopt working to actually help the under-resourced youth?

Steckly: Yeah, so Compudopt, we're actually the largest and the only nonprofit in the country that has a complete digital equity solution that's delivered at no cost to all of our program participants. And we deliver our programs across four core pillars, right? The first of those is device access. So we take corporate computers and we wipe and refurbish those and get them back out into the community to kids and families that don't have access to devices at home. Free low-cost internet solutions, digital literacy training, and then technology education programs that are aligned towards workforce. Because, really, handing out a computer and getting people connected is about laying a foundation for economic mobility, and that's what we're really after. We can't talk about that without talking about workforce.

Brown: And how are you measuring the success of your program?

Steckly: So, like everyone else, of course, we count the number of computers and the number of people impacted every year. But we're also one of the first agencies in this particular space to add a full dedicated resource, a chief impact officer and a team, to really measure the qualitative impact, making sure that as our intentions are to help people get more access to workforce, careers, jobs, employment, housing relief, et cetera, et cetera, that that's actually happening. And so we do that through conversations and surveys and lots of community interviews.

Brown: So what is next for Compudopt?

Steckly: Yeah, so world domination is certainly on the to-do list. Because this is such an incredibly solvable problem and we really believe that the solution that we have is immensely deployable, pretty much anywhere, in any city, state, town across the country, but maybe even around the world. And we hope that, you know, in the future, this isn't a problem.

Brown: Megan Steckly, thank you so much for joining us.

Steckly: Thank you. My pleasure.

Brown: And thanks to you as well for watching. For more conversations about digital equity and broadband expansion, visit GettingConnected.com. I'm Dara Brown. ♪♪ ♪♪