As the world continues to evolve, the level in which technology touches the world is growing exponentially, but the quantity and quality of talent to power this evolution isn’t readily available. Anyone who has tried to hire great technical talent recently has felt this I’m sure.

To fix this we need to improve the pipeline of engineers, and what better way to do that than to train them yourself from an early age. Here at VUE we are huge proponents of early technical education.

My name is Brian Clark and I’ve been coding since I was 12 years old.

One day my dad came home and gave me a pamphlet for the Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program and asked if anything sounded interesting. I grew up around computers and always had a mind for taking things apart so the computer science class listed sounded like an great way for me to deconstruct another piece of technology.

I instantly fell in love with coding and haven’t looked back over the last 12 years.

As I’ve grown up it has become very apparent being around computers and being offered the opportunity to learn to code at such a young age is absolutely not the case for most students out there. I was extremely lucky to be placed in such a great position with my parents bringing these values home and providing me with opportunities.

Now as the CEO of VUE I want to give many other kids the opportunity to traverse the path that I’ve been able to follow.

In order to make that happen I spend part of my time as an instructor and board member at Mission Bit, a non-profit in San Francisco teaching public school students how to code in after school classes. By exposing children to programming, especially with the intent of actually building a product, we can see leaps and bounds in a candidate’s capabilities and professional viability. Some of our students today don’t even have a computer at home.

It’s very rewarding to be a part of this program and I’m excited to kick off Week 1 of Mission Bit, Fall 2014. Over the last year we’ve expanded from 1 class and 15 students to 8 classes and 150 students!

Mission Bit truly increases kid’s potential

One day these kids can work for tech companies or even go on to build their own companies. Whether the students continue coding or not, being able to build, or simply understand how technology operates, opens so many doors for them and their communities.

At the moment we have 150 kids at Mission Bit and need  60+ Macbooks to write code on and practice. We would be grateful for your help so Mission Bit can help build the next crop of techies build the future.

Are you in the tech community and looking to support Mission Bit?

Donate your time volunteering to teach kids at our headquarters in San Francisco.

Donate your laptops to Mission Bit.

Sponsor a trip to your company headquarters to let engineers meet kids who want to  build stuff. This doesn’t cost you anything, and by hosting a visit to your company for an hour in the afternoon and letting your engineers talk to and motivate young developers, you help substantially.

So if you’re looking to fix your recruiting pipeline, start from the beginning and train the engineers of the future, you never know what they may come up with and it’s unbelievably fun and rewarding along the way.

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