Our Mission
Operation Spark is a nonprofit software training center on a mission to provide opportunities for upward mobility through skills training and job placement in high-wage tech careers.
Who We Serve
80% of low-income students drop out of college strapped with debt. Across the South, we have been left with thousands of young adults, ages 16 to 24, not in school and unemployed or underemployed. The impact on our communities is devastating.
Meanwhile, as of June 2022, nearly 700,000 high-wage computing jobs remain unfilled across the country, while our colleges and universities graduated less than 200,000 computer science students last year.
Focused on areas where generational poverty is an issue, Operation Spark delivers practical learning tools and programs that provide accessible, accelerated workforce development for high-wage careers in technology.
What does that mean concretely? We teach you to write software using industrial tools, writing actual apps, and working in an awesome team environment. With six months of training, you'll be ready to launch your career as a fully autonomous, full-stack developer in the high-wage software industry.
Our Culture of CodeA Career for Everyone
The field of software development is quite wide. No matter your interests or aptitude, there's certainly a career for you in the software industry. You just need to build a few apps to start discovering all that software has to offer.
The skills involved in building mobile video games and apps are quite varied, including application design, game mechanics and user experience, visual and sound design, computer engineering of various sorts, quality assurance, project, product and cost management, content management, and public relations of all kinds. And each of these skills leads to careers, careers with futures - for example, an entry-level quality assurance analyst is a well-paying, entry-level position that can lead to a job in management or a career as a UX designer.
The Operation Spark model is simple: We introduce you to a wide set of skills and help you apply these skills in building engaging projects like mobile video games and apps. At Operation Spark, you may just discover a high-wage career that ignites your passion.
Our History
Started in September 2013, as a pilot project with youth community centers around New Orleans, Operation Spark taught young adults how to build simple mobile video games and apps with the goal of igniting the pursuit of an employable passion. These early experiments led to a robust High-School to High-Wage software training program for public school students across Louisiana. Coupled with an extensive summer teacher academy that prepares educators to offer our curriculum in their local classrooms, Operation Spark annually engages over 600 young people in exploring software careers.
In 2015, Operation Spark partnered with Hack Reactor in San Francisco to develop an adult workforce program, Immersion, graduating its first class in January 2016. Later that year, we were granted a license by the Louisiana Board of Regents to operate as a proprietary school offering Industry-Based Credentials in JavaScript, Functional Programming, and Web Development (Levels 1, 2, and 3). Operation Spark graduates are now applying their career-changing skills worldwide at companies like LinkedIn, UbiSoft, DXC, GE, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and PayPal.
Today, Operation Spark is an approved training provider with the Louisiana Department of Education and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, providing in-demand software training programs for high school students, teachers, and adult learners across the Southeast.
Team
Board of Directors
John Fraboni, President & CEO
Operation Spark, New Orleans
Max Gaudin, Chair
Head of Growth, Soul Addict
Grace Clark-Espinoza
Management Development Analyst, City of New Orleans
Rikia Stewart
Software Developer