In this episode of the Being Found Show, the guys talk about Cloud Wise Academy where students learn by developing real-world applications with hands-on training. Also, we talk about how business owners can greatly benefit from having a trained workforce.

Joe: This is the being found show the local businesses guide to being found by more buying customers. You can check us out on Beingfound.com or listen on  KCNR1460am or our podcast or all the different ways we’re trying to make it possible for you to listen. There is a new class coming at Cloud Wise Academy to give a little context here. We have the being found show. We also have a marketing business called Cloud Potential. I’m going to tell you about a nonprofit project that’s going on called Project Hometown that we’ll talk about. A real passion of mine is the Cloud Wise Academy school that we run and we run it right here at Redding. It’s a small school we’re not like the size of the college or anything like that but we do classes. We try to do one every six weeks somewhere between you know 20 ish people come to a class and we try to teach the most valuable tech skills that are needed right now in the workforce. The other thing we try to do is get rid of that stigma. That this can’t be done or you can’t do this or you’re not able to do this or you’re not a tech person. Every single person who’s taken our school so far is someone who has hardly opened a computer. We had to tell some people what a browser was and if you just said I don’t even know what you mean by a browser, well then you’re perfect for our school because we start teaching you how to open your computer and find out which browser is right.

So anyone can take it. And this is the classes are really inexpensive. They’re $275 for six weeks. We’ve got a class coming up. We’ve already got 8 or so students enrolled in the class which is on November 6. We also have a scholarship before I talk about the class. You can go to Cloud Wise Academy and scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see some links for signing up for the scholarships or donating scholarships. It’s a completely nonprofit. I actually don’t control it. It’s controlled by the Shasta Regional Community Foundation. They also review all of the applications and determine who can get through. But the idea of the scholarship is to help people who really want to improve their lives and learning these skills can help them improve their lives because they’re in such high demand. So if you think you don’t deserve this class, if you think that you’re at a point in life or you have to change if you think you’re at a point where nothing’s working or you have kids or family members who you know they didn’t spend a fortune on college or they feel like they’re at a dead end or life’s not going the way they want, these scholarships are for you and the school is for you. To me, it’s trying to take the term alternative education out of alternative education. This is just education.

Chauncey: It’s just skills. I don’t care what you do, there is not a single career on this planet, you know, if you’re a ditch digger, computer skills will help you. They will help you move up and in any career that you’re in.

Joe: Google just did its biggest grant ever of one billion dollars. Google is donating to help train the workforce. Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple, training the workforce. Why are they doing this? Well because these skills are so needed they’re so in demand.

Chauncey: Not to get off topic from the school, but I read an article a while back that said that 70 percent of the careers that are going to exist 20 years from now and I mean 70 percent of the careers 20 years from now don’t exist today.

Joe: Yeah that’s right. Well and we’re training people in college. Colleges matter and there a way for some of us but they’re not away for all of us. And colleges aren’t even teaching the skills that are valid now let alone the skills that we don’t even know need to be taught. So it’s why schools like mine, which there’s a lot of them I’m not the only one. It’s why Google and WozU that are doing this because they know that there needs to be a more rapid way to train these skills. It can’t all be a four-year college or a six-year or eight years. The reason is the skills that are needed are needed now and they evolve. What you and I learned to do even two or three years ago, Chauncey, has become obsolete in some cases -or were foundational and now we have to do a whole other set of things.

I’ll give you another example of your ditch digger analogy. I went out to the logging conference where Shasta College and Shasta Cascade Logging Foundation go out and there’s all these stops of all the different ways people do logging and all the equipment and you kind of walk around get to see how does a sawmill work how does the machine, these giant tractors that cut down trees, work like people don’t do that with a chainsaw anymore. So there’s a tractor that grabs a tree and a socket it and that lays the tree down. So I went to all these and you know up in all of them there was a laptop sitting in that big monstrous machine or there was a computer running that mill that cuts the trees into planks and the whole reason I was invited to go out there was because the logging industry can’t find enough trained workers to help them operate those machines. But now what happens when that computer inside that giant machine goes down who drives out there and repairs that?

Chauncey: A lot of those types of jobs are generational. You know so my dad was a logger and then I became a logger because I live in the proper location. And I had the opportunity to become that and because it’s generational, it was done one way before and it’s done another way now. And so there’s that Skip in that education. That’s what you’re talking about as a good way to turn that education quickly on to people who want to continue doing those generational items but need that little extra bit of technological education. Right.

Joe: Right. Well and you know I just feel so blessed because you know, Cloud Wise Academy was getting started a little over a year ago and I can’t remember how many students were taught. But in that same amount of time, we now will be teaching high school kids. We’re going to be teaching them skills needed for our project hometown program coming up. We’re currently teaching at a local college and we will be teaching in Butte starting in January. I say that because how awesome is that that the colleges see that these skills need to be introduced in a rapid fashion into their communities and they’re just acting on it. They’re doing it. So you know this is not abstract; this idea that these skills need to be taught or that they’re missing. Even our college system is going to work to try to get them in. The giants of the tech world are starting to put massive amounts of resources into teaching these skills. And why does this matter? Well, I want people in our community who need another start or maybe run a business and you want to know more about technology so you can do a better job. I want you to know about the school and I want you to know there’s no reason you can’t do it. It’s $275 a class and if you can’t afford that there’s a scholarship and if you can’t afford that I’ll probably pay for you. So there’s just no reason to not take this. These skills are in super high demand but the other reason I talk about this is to point out for our local businesses, you can’t stand on the sidelines anymore.

Joe: If you’re not going to train your self and you don’t want to learn these new skills, which by the way almost every business owner I talked to says “I’m too far in the way I do things or I spent the last 20 years learning what I needed to to get here. I don’t want to learn all this stuff.” Fine don’t. But you better be training your workforce. There is not a business in Redding, not one single business, that should not be sending somebody in their business through Cloud Wise Academy, especially this next class coming up which is WordPress, which you know that something like a quarter of the Internet’s built with WordPress. Almost every Website in town is probably built with WordPress. So business owners, if you don’t want to learn more fine don’t. There are things I don’t want to learn. I’m a terrible writer and I don’t even want to spend the 10 years it takes for me to build or write something. That’s why I do a radio show instead of a blog. But there’s no reason that you can’t send your workforce to Cloud Wise Academy or Udemy.com, that’s another place that you can learn. In other words, you better start training your workforce because the rest of the world is working to train their workforce and Cloud Wise Academy is here, Project Hometown’s here, the Being Found Show here, all of it’s here to make sure your workforce is trained.

Listen to the full episode : Being Found Show