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Recode Radio presents Recode Decode coming to you from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Executive Editor of Recode. You may know me as someone who would be a huge fan of Louisville Cardinals if only I knew what sport they played.

But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech and media's key players, big ideas and how they're changing the world we live in.

You can find more episodes of Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music or wherever you listen to your podcast, or just visit recode.net slash podcasts for more.

Today we're going to do our first ever roundtable on Recode Decode and this week I have been visiting towns in West Virginia and Kentucky, learning about the future of tech jobs in an area that is a little different from Silicon Valley.

I'm joined in the studio in Louisville, Kentucky by the CEO and founder of Tech Jobs Tour, Leanne Pittsford, the CEO of Interapt, Anchor Gopal, Crystal Atkins, a student from their program and writer Rodriguez, who founded Code Louisville, who's working with the government to bring more tech jobs to the area. Welcome everybody.

Good. So it's a lot of people, so I'm going to just go slowly and make sure everyone has a lot to say. It's a really amazing couple of days I've spent here from both West Virginia and Kentucky.

There's been a lot of focus this past election on jobs and on bringing back coal jobs specifically in this region, which I think is kind of misplacing where the future is going.

And then there's a lot of efforts in the area that we've seen to try to diversify the economy in one area is in tech, which means everyone here is competing with people globally in Silicon Valley and all over everywhere.

It's a really interesting attempt to do it. It's an interesting attempt to train people and we're going to talk about it.

Let's start Leanne first with you. This is the tech jobs store, which I went on with you when we visited Painsville and Pikeville, Kentucky and we're in West Virginia and Charleston.

Can you just give a very short description of what you're trying to do here?

Yeah, so it's the tech jobs tour. So we're going on tour across America. It's one year, 50 cities, 100,000 jobs. So right now in America, there are over half a million open jobs.

At the same time, there's this intense growth, growth of non-traditional talent. So online courses, coding boot camps, and I work with a lot of tech companies and they really don't know how to hire from this new generation of technical talent.

So we wanted to go across America, especially post election and really find out what's working in each city because there's so much innovation and credible talent across America.

Essentially what we're trying to do is bring together the ecosystems. Oftentimes, you know, this was our tenth stop in Louisville and the employers and the people who need jobs actually just need to connect. It's sometimes as simple as that. So we're really trying to do that and then figure out how we can, you know, scout and scale things that are working in each market.

You were trying to call the attention to it. It's America's hiring, hashtag America's hiring.

Now we have lower levels of employment right now in this country, but it's shifting people to the jobs that are better and pay better and they're not part of a dead end situation where things are going to be going away.

It's more than jobs. It's economic opportunity, right? It's the promise of the American dream. Right now, the average salary for Americans is about 20,000. The average tech salary is over 80,000. That's a huge increase. I mean, that will change your entire life.

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