Workforce Solutions Borderplex and wAIfinder are offering a free, 22-week AI development program for Texas residents
Workforce Solutions Borderplex is offering 8 candidates enrollment in a 22-week work-based learning program to learn how to build and deliver a real AI-agentic solution for small businesses.
Here’s how it will work: For the first 12 weeks, you’ll spend 25 hours a week learning from wAIfinder’s lead AI software developer who will guide you with both daily instruction and project-based tasks. Then, you’ll have 10 weeks of experience actually building AI agents on the wAIfinder software dev team! Along the way, we’ll help you develop skills and a portfolio of experience to showcase your future employer.
… but there’s more: for the first 12 weeks of instruction, you’ll earn a stipend of $1,650. After instruction completes, you’ll accelerate to a work-based learning stipend of $18- 22/hr for 30 hours a week for the next 10 weeks.
The Info
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Requirements
College degree
Resident of the El Paso, Texas
Currently underemployed or unemployed
Computer requirements
Authorized to work in the United States
Applicants must meet the eligibility requirements as determined by WSB.
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Application Process
Apply today via application link below.
A wAIfinder admissions counselor will review. Qualified candidates will be selected for an interview with Borderplex.
Workforce Solutions Borderplex will determine final eligibility.
Final candidate selection will be in early January.
Onboarding information will be sent to selected candidates 1 week before the program start date.
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Benefits
$1,650 stipend, paid over the first 12 weeks
$18-22/ hour pay for 10 weeks of work-based learning (pay based on performance, with raises given for accelerating skill development.)
Career services support
Portfolio of work to showcase
Real-world experience for your resume
What to Expect on the Job
Beginning day 1, you’ll log in for ‘work’ at 10:00 AM (MT) Monday through Friday for a “staff meeting” with your manager, wAIfinder’s Lead AI Software Engineer. Over the first 12 weeks, your manager will help you learn the skills needed to build an AI-agentic application (for example, a customer‑support agent that can summarize tickets, draft replies, and update CRM records) with accelerating lessons and hands-on experience.
Then, you will be “promoted” to an entry-level AI Software Developer for wAIfinder, where you’ll spend 10 weeks working on daily tasks that contribute to your team’s project – delivering features for a real small‑business AI agent.
When complete, we’ll help you showcase your experience to future employers, leapfrogging your new grad peers who lack the real‑world experience to make an immediate impact with employers.
Who We Are
Workforce Solutions Borderplex is the get you back to work office for El Paso and West Texas. We work with businesses and individuals to identify new opportunities, access aid, and improve skills, to strengthen the local workforce and improve quality of life for residents.
We’re a nonprofit opportunity incubator, personalizing the career path and connecting the right people to the right positions. Our organization and its initiatives have been recognized and awarded by the Texas Workforce Commission for our innovative approach to assisting employers and job seekers. With the tools, programs and services we provide, we know you can do anything you put your heart into.
wAIfinder was created to solve a problem: college graduates don’t have enough experience to be ‘entry-level’, and employers don’t have time to train them. Enter wAIfinder, designed to bridge that gap and create the next generation of AI empowered engineers, developers, cyber security analysts, and more.
With over 50 years of combined experience in software engineering and workforce development at Fortune 100 tech companies, industry non-profits, and training companies, our founders have seen the patchwork solutions, worsening unemployment data, and desperate pleas from employers to help find qualified new hires.
