Facebook’s TechPrep Tries to Fix Race Gap in Tech World

Many tech companies noticed that there are too few female, Black and Hispanic IT experts out there, but Facebook thinks that it has found the underlying issue behind this problem which is now trying to address with a newly launched site – TechPrep.

Facebook’s TechPrep tries to fix race gap in tech world starting with infancy. The site provides parents and guardians with valuable information on what a tech career may mean to their kids. Facebook knows that parents and guardians, also known as ‘influencers,’ play a huge role in helping a child pursue a tech career later in life.

The world’s largest social networking platform rolled out TechPrep not only to lure in more computer scientists and computer engineers, but also to provide beginners in these fields with valuable resources and content such as tutorials, videos, and games. Other tech companies have made a similar move recently including Google and Apple to raise the numbers of programmers and tech experts.

TechPrep also tries to explain as simply as it can what computer science really is. The message is not only addressed to kids but also to their parents. A recent survey showed that more than 75 percent of parents in Latino and Black communities had no idea what a computer science career means. Moreover, 83 percent of those parents didn’t know how to provide guidance to their kids that wanted to pursue such career.

As a result, most children in underserved communities do not know what they are missing. Maxine Williams Facebooks’ face for Diversity believes that the race gap we see in tech world is not caused by lack of potential in an ethnic group, but by lack of opportunity.

TechPrep offers valuable resources to parents, kids and young adults. Self-starters can also have access to information that may be of use. The site is available in both Spanish and English and it runs on both mobile handsets and desktops.

Some lessons can be downloaded even on community computers in local libraries and schools. This way, poor kids that lack Internet access at home can study the valuable lessons offline.

On the site, you can also find out the average salary of a programmer or computer scientists and how much education each career requires. There are even profiles of real people that succeeded in a tech career.

Williams disclosed that the profiles were designed to appeal the Black and Hispanic audience with similar life stories.