For the past few years, Colorado has been making headlines due to its dire need of skilled tech workers. While there have been thousands of tech jobs open at any one time, there have been too few workers who have been qualified and experienced enough to fill those jobs. Today, the situation has only improved a little, if at all, and Colorado is still left with over 16,000 open computing jobs, according to the Denver Post.

Steve Roatch, CEO of Twentyseven Global, said “We’re seeing this phenomenon in all the markets we serve. The solution lies in creating new talent yet businesses today are left to compete for the existing talent. We help solve that problem by sourcing hard to find skills in our offshore teams while managing projects tightly with our local consulting teams.”

The Denver Post suggests that the best way to fix this gap is to begin with education. If Colorado can encourage more kids to take an interest in Computer Science and sign up for AP Computer Science classes, it may build up a large enough skilled workforce for the future.

Three bills are currently being considered in order to improve the gap from an education level. One bill would provide a $1,000 bonus for every high school student who completes certain courses or training, another would add technology skills to Colorado’s content standards and finally the other one would require computer science be included in state guidelines for math and science education.

Twentyseven Global has discussed this skilled worker gap and the topic of tech talent scalability in several previous blogs, and it’s one of the reasons why Twentyseven Global opened its Denver office in the first place.

Kansas City, where Twentyseven Global is headquartered, is also experiencing a small gap, but not to the same extent Denver is, with only about 2,000 computer science jobs needing to be filled. One of the ways in which Kansas City is dealing with this issue is by encouraging local startup accelerators along with tech conferences and events to attract more workers.