Business and government are competing heavily to recruit engineers, data scientists, and other top technology talent as digitization transforms our lives.
In this race to attract exceptional tech talent worldwide, philanthropy is underrepresented. This is despite the enormous potential for advanced computing and other modern tools to help philanthropic organizations solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, like economic disparity and climate change.
As a 2017 survey found, most computer-science students say they most want to work at tech companies or government agencies. What would it take for philanthropy to compete?
First, we should invest more deeply in building sets of data and tools that will make it possible for tech talent to contribute their skills to solving major social challenges.
As just one example, at Schmidt Futures, we’re investing in and helping deploy tech talent to such an effort led by Sendhil Mullainathan. He is aiming to build computational medicine — a new field at the intersection of medicine, statistics, and computation that seeks to bring together data from health-care providers and researchers in an open but secure way to identify breakthroughs in diagnostics and clinical decision- making.
We can also do more to support enterprising young people in developing their own data sets, such as by making grants to student groups.
Second, we should make a more efficient market for talented technologists who are inspired by philanthropic work and would consider applying to our organizations if they knew more about what we can offer and how we can help others together. For example, we can visit campuses and make hiring decisions at the same time businesses do so that students can genuinely weigh our offers. We can also band together to recruit technologists into our field.
Third, we should do more and better on-the-job professional development. Together, we can create opportunities for young people to work at multiple philanthropic organizations as part of rotational exchanges that introduce them to the field. What’s more, we can do more to encourage our technology talent to share their knowledge with others within and outside of the philanthropic world to build shared communities of practice. Such efforts recognize that technologists don’t work simply for a paycheck; they often want to make an impact on the world and in their profession.
Modeled After Google
At Schmidt Futures, one modest way in which we’ve been pursuing these three goals is by creating a philanthropic Associate Product Manager program, which launched last year and now has trained 10 people; 10 more will be starting this summer, and more are on the way, as we will be visiting campuses soon to select our next class for 2021. Modeled after an effort to groom talent that was pioneered at Google and elsewhere, this program selects recent graduates from computer-science programs to join Schmidt Futures as full-time members of our team for two years. During that time, they work with nonprofits and other organizations where they can offer their computing skills as essential resources to advance important efforts that benefit the common good.
Participants in our Associate Product Manager program draw on both project management and technology skills — especially in data science and machine learning — to make progress on major societal challenges. For instance, one of our colleagues in this program has been working with researchers to build technology solutions that reduce the cognitive-development gap affecting children in poor communities. These colleagues also value opportunities to learn from influential figures and mentors in technology during their time with us, to rotate into multiple projects focused on an array of social missions, and to support others outside the class in building a network of like-minded talent.
We have many extraordinary people in philanthropy today. They are brilliant and creative. They have come to careers serving others against many compelling alternatives, often passing up money, training, structured career paths, and other resources offered routinely by jobs in business.
We’ll need even more of these exceptional individuals on our teams — especially those with technology backgrounds — as we help develop innovative solutions for society’s challenges. And once we do hire them, we must do more to support them as well.
The Associate Product Manager program is only one effort; we can work together to create more. Let’s invest in more data; let’s build a more efficient job market. Let’s hire more tech talent to carry out our work and develop them professionally in philanthropy so we can all do more for others.