The tech industry in New York City is booming, but is the NYC school system preparing its students to take advantage of the tens of thousands of new jobs coming to the city over the next decade? A new report by the Center for an Urban Future finds that tech companies want to hire locally, but the current “skills-building ecosystem” isn’t producing enough qualified applicants.

The good news is that every year there are more and more resources for students and adults who want to learn computer science (CS) skills. And if Mayor de Blasio can meet his CS4All goal, all NYC public school students will receive a meaningful, high‐quality CS education at each school level by 2025. If your school already offers a great CS curriculum or after-school program, let us know by adding a comment to its InsideSchools page!

If not, check out our Free Programs page, where we list hundreds of free after-school, weekend and summer programs you can enroll your child in to help them learn new skills and have fun in the process. We just added 14 new programs that this report profiled, covering STEM education, coding and technology, and advanced mathematics. Here are three that we love:

  • Girls Who Code: Summer Intensive Program, where rising juniors and seniors learn different computer science principles with art, storytelling, robotics, game- and web development, field trips to tech companies, guest speakers from the industry, and workshops that allow participants to meet female engineers and entrepreneurs; and
  • Rockaway Waterfront Alliance Environmentor Internship program, where students are paired with professional scientists to gather environmental data from around the Rockaway peninsula and then analyze it in a university lab.
  • Cooper Union Saturday Outreach program, where students learn design thinking, collaboration, and computational thinking to solve real-world problems, then prototype them on cool equipment like 3-D printers and laser cutters.

(And don’t forget to use that technology device you’re on right now to tell us what you think in the COMMENTS section!)

Image via Girls Who Code