When a State Hires a Scholar
How Early-Career Technologists Are Building Government Capacity
By Rebeca Lamadrid, Chief Program Officer, NobleReach Foundation
Across the country, state governments are navigating rapid shifts in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data modernization, and automation. The private sector is moving quickly, and government cannot afford to fall further behind. But while modernizing government is often framed as a technology problem, in reality, it is a talent problem.
Top computer science and data science graduates rarely consider a state agency for their first job—often because of a lack of exposure, state government salaries that trail the private sector, and slow-moving hiring processes. This results in a structural gap that prevents effective civil service teams from achieving their goals, from cybersecurity resilience to service delivery and beyond.
NobleReach Foundation was founded in 2022 to help close that gap. Our Scholars Program matches early-career technologists with high-impact roles inside state and local government and supports them throughout the experience with a stipend, education, and mentorship. Scholars work under career civil servants who know the agency and its stakeholders.
Applications to the program have grown to almost 2,000 since the first cohort, and Scholars now serve across 13 states and Washington, D.C. What does that work actually look like? Here are four examples:
The City of Seattle needed to replace its processes for employee leave requests and performance reviews—functions that affected workers across every department. A NobleReach Scholar embedded with the city’s technology team took on both projects, designing and building new digital platforms for each.
The work required more than technical skill. It demanded an understanding of how city government actually operates, with all of its procurement constraints, approval chains, and workforce dynamics. The platforms are now used across Seattle’s departments. They were built by a Scholar who came in without government experience, working alongside civil servants who knew what the agency actually needed.
Deploying new technology inside government is one challenge. Making sure it is used well is another. In Oklahoma City, a NobleReach Scholar helped build that second layer of capacity. Over the course of their placement, the Scholar developed and delivered multi-week training courses on process mapping and change management for city employees while helping establish data governance policies and trainings across departments.
The goal was not simply to hand off a finished product. It was to give city staff the knowledge to manage and adapt what the Scholar helped build. Oklahoma City now has internal capacity it did not have before the Scholar arrived, and upskilled staff who can sustain it after the Scholar leaves.Courts across the country are grappling with a practical question: As AI tools become more widely available, what rules should govern how judges and lawyers use them? In New Mexico, a NobleReach Scholar worked directly with court staff to develop AI guidelines for legal practice in the state. The work required translating fast-moving technical realities into frameworks that legal professionals could apply in their day-to-day work.
It also required earning the trust of an institution designed to move carefully. The guidelines that resulted were developed with New Mexico’s courts themselves; not imported from another state or adapted from a national template.Cybersecurity is a daily operational concern for state government; not a crisis to be managed when it arrives. Yet state agencies rarely have enough technical headcount to match the pace at which threats and systems evolve. In Maryland, a NobleReach Scholar worked alongside agency staff as part of the standing response team. This is the kind of hands-on work rarely assigned to someone two years out of school. A technically skilled NobleReach Scholar who can work across agencies, and who is already cleared, onboarded, and trusted, gives senior staff a force multiplier they cannot easily hire for. The Scholar’s presence in Maryland meant incidents received faster attention than they otherwise would have.
Each NobleReach Scholar’s placement produces concrete results for the host agency. It also does something less visible: It introduces a generation of technologists to public service early in careers that will span decades.
A Scholar who spends a year inside a state agency learns how government actually works—its constraints, its incentives, and its responsibility to the public. That knowledge does not disappear when the placement ends. Future founders, executives, and senior officials who carry it forward will understand public institutions differently than peers who never served.
For state leaders looking to build technical capacity without simply competing on salary, programs like the NobleReach Scholars Program offer an exciting pathway.
Thirteen states and D.C. are already building technical capacity with NobleReach Scholars. If yours isn’t, we’d love to start the conversation with you. Email Neghena Hamidi at neghena.hamidi@noblereach.org, and let’s connect.