In 2000, I taught an unaccredited programming course at my local community college. It was once a week for four hours on Saturdays. The language, Perl, was an

In 2000, I taught an unaccredited programming course at my local community college. It was once a week for four hours on Saturdays. The language, Perl, was an elective. The choice of language and scheduling guaranteed a rather diverse group of students. One fellow in his late 40s was a security guard at the college, and so classes were inexpensive for him. He was particularly drawn to my class because there were a number of Perl related jobs in the area at the time. During my office hour after the class, we sometime chatted and I discovered that he had been working at a local manufacturing facility for almost 20 years. That facility had shut down some years earlier and all of the jobs moved overseas. (1) He was a pretty bright guy, and though he had almost no technical background before he started taking classes a year earlier, he was passing my class. I asked him about his hundred of ex-coworkers that had also been laid off. Few if any were making as much progress as he was toward building a new career from scratch in the second half of their lives. Some people can learn radically different, technical skills later in life. I'm now in the second half of my life and I'm learning new things every week, though I've been deep in technology since I was 10 years old. A better question is this: of the hundreds of people laid off from that factory, and the thousands laid off in that particular region, how many would be able to find tech jobs if even half managed to get the proper training? 1) The building lay idle for a couple of years, and then was bought by a large multinational company based in the area, and turned into its primary Information Systems location. https://www.google.com/maps/place/David+Glass+Technology+Center,+Bentonville,+AR+72712 https://www.google.com/maps/place/David+Glass+Technology+Cen... That's where 90% of the tech jobs in the area were, so over the next 9 years I would occasionally look up his name to see if he'd hired on. Once he finished his training I was going to surprise him at his desk! Alas, his name never came up. Not surprising in retrospect, since most of our positions wanted some experience.