Back in March, the White House announced its “TechHire initiative,” designed to fill a wide variety of tech-industry jobs. Plans included a $100 million H-1B grant competition, private-public partnerships between cities and private employers to place eligible candidates in tech jobs, and free online training and boot camps. The U.S. Department of Labor has now opened the initiative to applications, which can be found on Grants.gov (warning: it’s not the most intuitive interface). Those interested in finding opportunities can also take a look at the White House’s dedicated Webpage for the initiative, which includes an interactive map showing open tech jobs in the participating “TechHire communities.” “Today there are over half a million unfilled jobs in information technology across all sectors of the economy,” reads a note on the White House’s page. “These IT jobs make up ~12 [percent] of the approximately 5 million job openings making IT the largest occupational category for open jobs right now.” Recent data from Course Report suggests that 66 percent of participants in tech boot camps eventually land full-time jobs as programmers. While that’s an encouraging statistic, some within the tech industry have exhibited some skepticism about TechHire’s chances of success. For example, Jason Polancich, CEO of SurfWatch Labs, told The Wall Street Journal in March that he didn’t think two months of boot camp could prepare candidates “for identifying serious problems and overcoming them.” Nonetheless, the initiative seems dedicated to providing basic programming skills that don’t require a four-year degree or extensive time in the tech industry in order to pick up; in theory, the participation of local governments will help widen the pipeline of candidates to suitable tech jobs. But it may take some time to fully ascertain the results of all this work.