Jim McKelvey has stated his intentions to expand LaunchCode, the paired-programming initiative that is primed to help fix St. Louis’ tech talent shortage, to a national — and even international — level.
He’ll start in Miami, where he plans to move with his wife and son in a few weeks.
His 3-year-old son will be attending school there, McKelvey said. And if the city shows a need similar to St. Louis’ — namely, a need for more computer programmers to help grow companies — he’ll set up a LaunchCode division in the city.
“That’s just a place where I have friends and colleagues,” he said. “And Miami has two international airports, so it’s unique for me and what I do. But there is a chronic programming talent shortage that is a problem around the world.”
St. Louis will remain LaunchCode’s center of operations, he said. And McKelvey will continue to be involved in the handful of other initiatives he has going on in the city — SixThirty, Arch Grants, Cultivation Capital to name a few.
“St. Louis is my hometown and I’ll still favor it whenever I can,” he said.
McKelvey is the subject of Friday’s cover story in the St. Louis Business Journal. For more on that story, pick up a paper or visit the Business Journal’s website Friday morning.
McKelvey’s plan to expand LaunchCode was announced in April, when McKelvey said he was eying potential locations such as Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver and a location somewhere on the West Coast.
McKelvey said officials at EdX, a joint venture between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that offers free courses, including the computer science course LaunchCode is using to train some of its aspiring coders, are encouraging him to take the program national before it reaches its year anniversary, which is in September.
LaunchCode founder Jim McKelvey said this morning that he already has office space in Miami and will move there temporarily in June to work on a Miami version of the training and job-placement program. Baltimore, Philadelphia and Denver also are likely destinations for LaunchCode, he said.
McKelvey, speaking at an Innovation St. Louis forum at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said officials of EdX, an education joint venture between Harvard and MIT, encouraged him to expand LaunchCode. In St. Louis, LaunchCode is using a free EdX computer science class to train programmers. The class is offered online, but LaunchCode is offering hands-on sessions to augment the coursework.
LaunchCode, which began last September, has placed 57 programmers in $15-an-hour apprenticeships with St. Louis companies. Twenty-seven of those have been hired for full-time jobs at an average salary of $55 an hour, McKelvey said.
He sees the combination of EdX and LaunchCode as something that could disrupt the model for computer science education. “The program is going to the world with the message that education doesn’t have to put you into debt, and it doesn’t have to take up four years of your life,” McKelvey said.
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