This is the second in a series of five briefs about Opportunity Now Colorado, a $90M competitive grant program that used federal pandemic-recovery funds to invest in employer-led workforce partnerships across every county in the state. Each story profiles a model that emerged from the program and examines what other states may be able to apply to emerging industries and workforce needs. Read the first piece here.
Nels Motley graduated from Colorado State University with a computer science degree and started looking for work. What he found was a two-person startup called Aquanta Vision, spun out of CSU research, the kind of company most graduates never think to look for.
Motley is a software engineer there now, one of its three full-time employees. He works remotely from Montrose, a small city on Colorado’s rural Western Slope, on software that identifies methane leaks in camera footage and highlights them in red so they are easier to see and, therefore, fix.
“Before I got the internship, I didn’t even know this was a field,” he says.
This is what Innosphere set out to build: a workforce that nobody knew they could join. Motley had one of 158 internships that Innosphere, a startup accelerator and incubator in Fort Collins, Colorado, subsidized with part of a $1.3M grant from a state program called Opportunity Now. Most of the interns worked at the kinds of small and emerging companies that college students rarely hear of and that couldn’t afford them even if they did.
The grant helps offset many of the costs, so companies can hire interns—sometimes more than one—and put them on real work that their small teams might not otherwise get done. At Instafarm, a northern Colorado company that builds countertop microgreen farms in a garage-level shop, interns do real design and production work. At Rapicure Solutions, an intern created new chemical compounds and had a product in hand before the internship ended.
More Jobs Than People
Opportunity Now spread $90M in federal pandemic-recovery funds, supplemented with state dollars, across 102 grants in all 64 of Colorado’s counties. It did it on terms another state could copy—the money was competitive rather than formula-based, it required employers to be in the lead, and it rewarded models built to outlast the investment.
Innosphere used its grant to build a pipeline for systems engineers, a generalist role that is stubbornly hard to fill and also is essential to keeping complex technical projects running across Colorado’s advanced industries.
The need is particularly acute in the aerospace and defense industries, and quantum will only add to the demand. In 2023 the federal government named Elevate Quantum, serving Colorado and New Mexico, as one of its designated tech hubs for quantum, and the consortium later drew a $40.5M federal award.
The Other 77
Innosphere organizes its work around one statistic: Out of 100 students who start high school in Colorado, only 23 will ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree.
“So what are we doing with the other 77?” says Kelsey Baun, the accelerator’s workforce development program manager.
While systems engineers will ultimately need a degree, Baun says the field can attract students to higher education who never pictured themselves as engineers or computer scientists. The field rewards the ability to work across disciplines and integrate systems, not a specific major.
Competition as Real Work
The grant funded five advanced systems engineering competitions at Colorado State University: the CyberTruck Challenge, the CyberTractor Challenge, the Urban Design Challenge, the VR/AR Challenge, and one built around CyberBoat. Each was designed to work like on-the-job training, with real problems from industry partners solved by mixed teams working with mentors. At the VR/AR Challenge, a neuroscience doctoral student and a theater major worked side by side. Neither had a background in computer science, and that was the point.
The competitions also gave students a window into just how widespread the cyber field is—so much so that it’s an essential function at John Deere, a company whose technology they thought of as rooted in the 19th century.
“What do you mean, cybersecurity and tractors? It’s a weird disconnect,” says Erin Zimmerman, Innosphere’s science communications manager.
But the machines are computer-run now and expensive, and John Deere had come to the CyberTractor Challenge looking for security specialists for its tractors. Students found a growing field they didn’t even know existed.
No Engineering Degree Required
The grant also underwrites a credential. It funds Colorado State University’s Fundamentals of Systems Engineering, a 500-level course that is one of the first courses designed specifically for systems engineering students, and finishing it earns a certification in the field. The course is graduate-level and welcomes people whose undergraduate degrees are not in engineering, Baun says.
“You don’t have to have a BS in engineering to be able to execute on the program,” she says. “A lot of it is project management, risk analysis—stuff that is not engineering-based.”
The goal is to help students build skills that they can use in jobs that are in high demand now and will continue to be as emerging industries grow.
“As a federally designated quantum hub, Colorado is betting on emerging industries that are shaping the future,” says Misti Ruthven, division director of talent innovation at the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. “Opportunity Now empowered employers to define the skills they need and build the pipeline early, so it’s Coloradans who fill those jobs.”
Training the Employer
In Innosphere’s view, training workers isn’t the hardest part of getting more people into emerging fields. It’s changing how employers hire. “Training the employer, not the employee, is actually a critical element,” Baun says.
She points to job postings for quantum-technician roles that demand a bachelor’s in physics for work that involves no physics, a requirement she calls a habit that screens out capable people before they apply. Workers, in turn, count themselves out of jobs they could do. The fix, Innosphere says, is to get employers to stop requiring credentials a job does not actually need.
That fight is a local front in a national one. The skills-based hiring movement, which advocates call tearing down “the paper ceiling,” has pushed employers and about half the states to drop four-year-degree requirements for jobs that never needed them.
Subsidize, Don’t Fund
Fifty percent of Innosphere’s Opportunity Now grant is directly used for work-based learning, and the organization stretches the dollars by asking employers to share the costs. Students apply to the employer, not to Innosphere, for internships; the accelerator covers the first $10 an hour and the employer pays the rest. Metropolitan State University of Denver operates its program with Innosphere on a sliding scale, subsidizing more for smaller companies and for women-, veteran-, and minority-owned firms and less for large ones that could afford interns without assistance.
Because every employer pays something, the dollars stretched to more than 25 companies and 158 interns, and brought in two- and three-person startups that could never have afforded a hire on their own. The program has already passed its goal of engaging 400 Coloradans.
Innosphere’s work also helped position Colorado to bring in additional federal dollars. The state joined with Wyoming to compete for a National Science Foundation ASCEND Engine, and won. The award advances technologies that help communities prevent and respond to natural disasters. Innosphere is the lead grantee on the NSF award.
The engine began at $7.5M a year for two years and has since grown to $15M a year for three more. Colorado’s earlier Opportunity Now grant helped the state qualify as a cost-sharing partner: against the first two years of federal money, the state put up $3.3M, including a $1.3M grant to Innosphere.
Innosphere’s team says its approach to bringing more residents into high-demand fields is not particular to Colorado. What mattered, Baun says, was spreading the money widely by covering part of the costs, but still expecting employers to contribute, and letting work experience rather than a particular major decide who counted as a systems engineer.
If programs like this can move beyond the typical boxes, maybe students can too. That’s what Motley would advise. “Don’t discount the smaller companies,” he says. “Most people apply only to names they recognize, and when those don’t pan out they assume the door is closed. Don’t be afraid to try out new stuff.”
He wasn’t, and the field he didn’t know existed is now his career.