YASMINE KOTTURI

To stay competitive in today's tech job market requires constant re-skilling and "up-skilling", to out run not only human competitors, but also machine competition-yes the robots are coming! The burden of re-skilling often falls onto the shoulders workers, and this burden is often heightened in online labor markets (freelancing such as Upwork, crowdsourcing such as AMT) where workers often lack support systems more readily found in traditional jobs. At the same time, workers continue to flock these online labor platforms, with some estimates projecting freelance, or contigent, workers will comprise 40% of U.S. laborforce in 2025. In this project, we are taking a participatory design approach to shaping tools and curriculum to facilitate local technical job mobility within the Pittsburgh area. This project is a collaboration with Profs Jeff Bigham, Amy Pavel and Sarah Fox and Mike Skirpan and Herman T Johnson of Community Forge, located in Wilkinsburg, PA.