It is estimated that there are – 25.000 in Hungary and over 1.000.000 in the EU – open positions in IT. Knowing that the market as well as the demand is growing, the founders of Lab.Coop (about which you can read more here) teamed up with Digital Natives, invited Barbara Fazekas, an ex marketing director of a private school passionate about education, to start the Green Fox Academy.
Upon starting the first challenge appeared – defining the correct target group for the school. They focused on people over 25, with a university degree, speaking English and having earned professional experience that would like to learn how to code. It turned out that such a group does exist from which they chose 21 people in a demanding 5-step process. In order to fund the Academy, the agencies have invited big companies to share the costs as well as participate in the process of learning.
The Academy is aimed to teach its students to become entry level Web Software Developers. It is a full time program with 8 hours spent in the office on top of which students get homework regularly. They are whole heartedly adhering to the mentoring method. Apart from hard skills, students will also be supported they are lacking certain soft skill e.g. presentation skill. For the 4-month-program the students will get used to a classic software workflow with weekly sprints and demos where they pitch their progress to the companies’ representatives every week. In the second part of the program students team up in 5 to work on a specific project using certain tools, stack and methods that are used on a daily basis in IT companies. This way the Academy wants to prepare its mentees for the closing step : hopefully landing a job at one of the companies.
The Academy will be diversifying its educational portfolio by kicking off new kinds of junior programs on the topics such as Big Data, integrated software development as well as offering education for mature developers and business professionals. Knowing the market and its potential GreenFox Academy aims to go international, so if you would be interested in becoming a local partner, get in touch with the CEO of the school Barbara Fazekas at [email protected].
