Project Overview
Project Description
Merit America is a national nonprofit that provides technical skills training, expert coaching, and professional development to propel thousands of hardworking adults stuck in low-wage work into upwardly mobile, family-sustaining careers at scale.
This project will be focused on improving Merit America’s consent form integration. This will be vital to the organization’s research initiatives. The data consent form, essential for studying learner wage gains, successful outcomes and program impact, is currently matched to learners solely through their email addresses, creating occasional mismatches that lead to data loss and skewed research insights. A possible solution could be to integrate the existing Dropbox-stored consent flow with the learner profiles, associating each consent form directly with a static Merit America learner ID. This advancement will ensure every consent form aligns accurately with a learner’s profile, providing research partners with reliable data while preserving the integrity of the impact studies.
This project will enable Merit America to increase immediate technical efficiencies but also build a robust infrastructure that supports our rapid scaling goals and growing community of learners.
Impact
This project is expected to yield a meaningful social impact by improving data accuracy in Merit America’s research studies, which ultimately strengthens the ability to measure and validate the impact on learners’ economic mobility. It also sets the bar for high-quality, short-term training providers proving that skills and experience can be as foundational as a four-year degree. At a high level, it is aimed to disrupt systems that prohibit low-income working adults from realizing their full potential by building a new, mainstream pathway to the middle class. By eliminating mismatched consent forms, it will be ensured that research partners can rely on clean, verified and comprehensive data to assess learner outcomes, wage gains and career progression—critical metrics for tracking our mission to lift low-income workers into in-demand tech roles.
This aligns closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). By streamlining the consent and data management processes, Merit America bolster the commitment to providing high-quality, accessible education and career pathways for underserved populations. The outcome is a more resilient, data-informed program equipped to address systemic barriers in the workforce and expand reach to serve tens of thousands of learners annually.
Eligibility Criteria
Skills / Experience:
- Required:
- API Development
- Programming
- Back End Programming
- Desired:
- Front End Programming
- Prototyping / Fast Prototyping
- Data Analysis + Statistics
Software Proficiency:
- Programming
Discipline:
- Software engineering
Preferred Fellow Local Experience (All projects can be completed remotely):
- N/A
Preferred Timezone (when the Fellow should be available for meetings):
- Compatibility with UTC-05:00, Eastern Standard Time (or nearby USA timezone)
