Fellow Portrait
Julia Taylor
GeekPack
GeekPack equips women and other underrepresented populations with vital digital skills to succeed in today’s tech-enabled world.
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North America
United States
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Fellow
2024
Workers lack essential digital skills–and the confidence to acquire them
According to the World Economic Forum, 90 percent of today’s jobs require digital skills. Yet one third of US workers, including more than 25 million women, lack these skills.
Like many women with a non-technical background, GeekPack founder Julia Taylor found herself ridiculed for asking questions while learning to code. She started the business that became GeekPack to create a welcoming community where participants, especially women, would feel comfortable learning.
“It took me a long time because I was insecure. I didn’t have a tech degree. But once I dove into learning on my own with free resources, my confidence grew,” Julia says. GeekPack aims to build similar confidence in its community members to empower them to pursue jobs requiring digital skills.
Hollywood makes you think tech is really complicated. Women often ask, ‘Isn’t this stuff hard?’ They imagine the film ‘The Matrix.’ Hollywood sensationalizes the complexity but I believe anyone, regardless of age or gender, can learn these tech and digital skills.
A virtual community makes learning tech skills possible
GeekPack takes a community-based approach to digital skill-building, offering training in fields ranging from web development to data analysis and AI. As Julia describes it, “GeekPack is exactly what the name says: a pack of geeks who look after each other. Pack is in the name because community is really important.”
The company enables financial freedom and lifestyle flexibility by teaching women tech skills, including everything from basic digital literacy and coding to AI, data analytics, and web development and design. Financial freedom might mean the ability to get a job, negotiate a raise, or start their own business. The company also works with other mission-driven organizations and with medium to large corporate clients to offer upskilling for their employees.
“If you don’t see someone who looks like you, you think you can’t,” Julia says. “If you try, and you get stuck and ask a question and someone makes fun of you, you don’t try again. We knock down those barriers. Our virtual community sets us apart.”
We want our community to be like a mirror so anyone who is not part of it can say ‘she looks like me.’ We want to represent as many different faces as possible.
GeekPack is closing the digital skills gap “one geek at a time”
Since inception, GeekPack has taught tech skills to more than 8,500 women–1,500-plus each month–and reaches more than 150,000 across its communities, email list, and social platforms.
The company’s biggest impact is in empowering women and marginalized communities to recognize their potential and believe they can do hard things to achieve success, however they define it. “The impact we have enables them to learn these in-demand, tangible, marketable skills that get them their dream job, a raise, a promotion, or the means to start their own business and become their own boss,” Julia explains. “It’s not just learning the skill, it's the confidence that goes along with it.”
The company’s vision is to reach a million women by 2030, not only transforming individual lives but enhancing local economies, feeding a vital talent pool, and passing on the gift of confidence to younger generations.
I am totally okay with the fact that I don’t know how to do everything, because I surround myself with people who do. We want to get a million women into tech by 2030 and I can’t make that happen by myself.
PHOTO GALLERY
