Talk Business & Politics Daily: The Convention and Coding edition

by Roby Brock ([email protected]) 195 views 

Editor’s note: You can watch the full video of today’s Talk Business & Politics Daily at the end of this report, or download an audio version through the iTunes store under “Talk Business & Politics.”

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Thursday’s edition of Talk Business & Politics Daily features a report from KATV’s Elicia Dover on the preparations for the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and Mary Dunlap, new director of the Arkansas Coding Academy at University of Central Arkansas.

Dover provides her final report from Philadelphia with analysis of whom some of the major speakers at Wednesday night’s convention were aiming to reach. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Vice-president Joe Biden and President Barack Obama all gave keynote speeches.

Tonight, Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination and will give the final speech of the convention. What messages might she need to communicate?

CODING 101
Last week, UCA officials and tech firm Metova announced a partnership to launch the Arkansas Coding Academy, a program aiming to produce more computer programmers and tech support for private businesses.

Mary Dunlap, formerly with the Iron Yard, is the new director the Arkansas Coding Academy. She said there is a major workforce need for these developers of the future.

“Most of our students come from a background of being under-employed, unhappily employed, or completely unemployed,” she said. “So they are looking for a way to re-educate themselves – maybe looking for an alternative or something that fits in really well with their four-year degree – so that they can come in and be re-educated quickly and then go back out into the workforce.

“Some of them are tinkerers in the workplace, like the one you call that’s the ‘unofficial IT guy or IT girl.’ Or you have somebody that has been really interested in the way computers work or the way websites work and things like that – that’s a lot of our kind of student base,” Dunlap added.

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