The 1st Coding Bootcamp with 100% Guaranteed Employment in Greece recently concluded with resounding success. Organised by the Alliance for Digital Employability (AFDEmp), in collaboration with the Athens University of Business and Economics, the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS), and its Greek member-society HePIS, the Bootcamp reskilled 30 previously unemployed candidates with no ICT background as full stack developers, while securing for them employment contracts in relevant well-paid jobs.
The Bootcamp participants completed 500 hours of training in Java and C# / .NET, while the 20 participating companies that hired the graduates were actively involved throughout the process to ensure that the knowledge gained was relevant, current and useful.
PEOPLECERT was among the main supporters of this action, offering administrative support, training classrooms and the certifications required. PEOPLECERT is also one of the participating companies that recently absorbed 2 of the programme’s graduates. In addition to their newly-acquired IT skills, these employees successfully demonstrated innovative thinking, motivation and passion, qualities ingrained in PEOPLECERT’s culture.
The Coding Bootcamp was AFDEmp’s first action with the aim to decrease youth unemployment through re-skilling 500,000 individuals in ICT within the next decade, primarily in Greece. This ambitious plan comes off the back of the recent study "Creating 500,000 new jobs in ICT” which demonstrated that AFDEmp's vision is realistic and feasible.
The initiative has three main goals; 1) to help reduce the current unemployment rate in Greece, which now stands at 25.6%, 2) to eliminate the gap between demand and supply of ICT skills, predicted to result in over 800,000 job vacancies by 2020 in Europe, and 3) to resolve a real problem in Greece, that despite the financial crisis and high unemployment rates, several businesses still struggle to find appropriately skilled IT staff.