The Volcker Alliance’s proposal to upskill the federal workforce received $300,000 in funding from the General Services Administration as part of the GEAR Center Challenge. The program will now focus efforts on teaching data skills to federal employees located in the Kansas City area. Thomas Ross, president of the Volcker Alliance, says that he hopes that they can learn from this effort, and spread it across government.
“It is a pilot. It’s an effort to take cohort of 250 from different agencies. Managers will come in and we’ll do a pre and post analysis to determine both what they picked up, but also… their comments about how we can make it better, what worked, what didn’t,” Ross said. “We are going to learn as much as we can and scale this over time through our Government to University sites, because those are perfect conduits for spreading good ideas like this one. We hope will it continue in Kansas City to reach more federal government employees there, but hopefully it will be moved to other sites.”