United States
Mike Feinberg writes and speaks on workforce development, vocational training, and career pathways for underserved communities. He is co-founder and president of Texas School Venture Fund and WorkTexas, a Houston nonprofit that provides tuition-free trade certifications and long-term career support to adults and young people. He co-founded KIPP earlier in his career, building it into a national public charter school network. His work has been featured in The Washington Post and on CBS' "60 Minutes." Feinberg holds honorary doctorates from Yale and Duke and was recognized as an Ashoka Fellow in 2004.
Neither of the two buildings WorkTexas occupies was designed for education. One is a repurposed corner of a Houston furniture showroom. The other is a former residential juvenile detention facility that held young people for a different reason entirely. Mike Feinberg, co-founder of WorkTexas, chose
For a program like WorkTexas, which runs about 11 weeks and requires roughly 170 hours of participation, the new funding stream lands squarely in range.
Last year, U.S. employers posted nearly 600,000 job openings in the skilled trades. About 150,000 new workers entered the trades labor pool through apprenticeship programs. The gap between those two numbers is not a rounding error. It is, according to a major new report from commercial real estate firm JLL, a structural crisis that could...
Mike Feinberg has a name for the future he thinks is coming: the Star Trek era. Robots will build our homes. Smart machines will care for our children. Artificial intelligence will handle much of what white-collar workers do today. He believes all of that, genuinely.
Jacob Martinez completed a 12-week HVAC course at WorkTexas in 2022. Today he works as an HVAC technician for the Houston Astros at Daikin Park, earning $60,000 a year with full benefits. He was 25 when he landed the job, and he did it without a college degree.
When more than 100 Houston-area employers helped shape the curriculum for WorkTexas, they delivered a message that most training programs rarely emphasize. Tech
Houston program helps teens and adults finish high school, train for good jobs, and thrive
