”The Future will be More Digital. The Question is: Who is going to Design It?”

We were there at Masters of Digital online conference last week to discuss the status and future of tech education in Europe.

Masters of Digital 2021 virtual summit presented an amazing line-up of digital leaders, brains and ideas from all over Europe on 3-4 February last week. The organiser was DIGITALEUROPE, the leading trade association representing digitally transforming industries in Europe. The event was subtitled „digital as the driver for Europe’s recovery”, and focused on the bright future and equally exciting present of European tech.

Codecool’s CMO, Anna Ferenczy, was also invited to the main stage panel „Digitally Enlightened: New World, New Skills” on day one of the event. The digital experts on the panel discussed what the upskilling landscape in Europe looks like now and where we go from here.

Spoiler alert: digital upskilling not only has a huge growth potential, it is actually an essential enabler in closing the widening tech skills gap.

The four experts invited to the panel represented both business and government sides, educators and support bodies, early and adult education experts, international and local organisations:

  • Una Fitzpatrick, Director, Tech Ireland
  • Anna Ferenczy, Chief Marketing Officer, Codecool
  • Mette Lundberg, Director of Politics and Communications, IT-Branchen, Denmark
  • Norberto Mateos Carrascal, EMEA Territory Business Consumption Director, Intel

The discussion covered a wide array of topics including:

  • enablers to make tech careers more inclusive,
  • necessity of early digital education for all
  • recent generic changes in career prospects,
  • COVID 19’s impact on tech education trends,
  • remote work and education insights, and
  • digital innovation’s impact on the environmental crisis.

We collected some insights from the discussion that we found especially inspiring.

 

1. „We should not take European tech education for granted.”

As Norberto Mateos Carrascal of Intel highlighted, if we look outside Europe we soon realise how fortunate we are in Europe on a global scale to have tech and education systems in place, available to a large part of the population.

However, we must see that there are still huge differences between regions regarding access to these systems, and even if there is access, we sometimes cannot fully utilise it.

We must provide the infrastructure where it is missing, and educate the educators on how to use technology.

COVID 19 challenged us to move both public and private education online, for kids and for adults, too, from one day to another. We could soon see how much public education in general lags behind private institutions in the use of digital tools across Europe, due to many times outdated infrastructure, curriculum and skills. Private schools, on the other hand, like Codecool, are more flexible and were able to make the switch fast and without disruption.

Mette Lundberg highlighted that you can see clearly in kids in online classes today that they are more passive, less engaged, have lower energy and don’t participate much.

Panelists agreed that this is because the quality of online education must also be improved. We need to bring excitement to online education, significantly upgrade the online student experience.

Ways to achieve this include trying curriculum innovation, implementing AI, and hybrid learning options (like Codecool’s model of varying individual coaching sessions with larger webinars and small team work activities).

Anna Ferenczy added that cooperation between the government and private schools can also be a powerful enabler of more accessible digital education.

2. „Heavy tech users don’t necessarily have tech skills.”

Mette Lundberg pointed out a basic misunderstanding about tech skills, namely that even the new, digital generations are not as digital as we might think they would be. She highlighted that although most children become superusers of technology at an early age today, still they don’t know how to create technology, they lack basic tech skills. The Danish IT Industry Association started a digital education program in Danish elementary schools to change this, and it has already reached 15,000 children.

In a quick poll 25% of the panel’s (obviously rather tech oriented) audience also admitted to being addicted to their mobiles and having no tech skills whatsoever. Confirming the fact that probably most non-tech oriented, but tech user adults lack creative digital skills, too.

A member of the audience challenged the panelists whether it is really useful to teach tech skills when tech is changing so fast.

The experts agreed that in the education of the future workforce soft or meta skills, like computational thinking, creativity, and effective learning are much more important than actual programming skills. Anna Ferenczy highlighted that employers today value a solid combination of soft skills combined and tech skills, too.


3. „Diversity is not just a moral or ethical question. It’s also about profit.”

Una Fitzpatrick talked about a highly productive collaboration of a group of businesses with the government about the „Connecting Women in Technology” program, which aims at shifting the gender balance in digital employment, by attracting, promoting and encouraging women in STEM careers.

She explained that you have to make tech careers attractive to women to make an impact, and that this work starts at an early age in schools, and continues at the workplaces that need to offer a female friendly environment, use accessible language, and provide promotion opportunities for women.

Anna Ferenczy pointed out that diversity should not only be a key moral and ethical consideration, but also a financial and productivity based one. One recent research found that companies with women executives in their boards realised bigger share price gains, stronger revenue growth and higher profits.

Una Fitzpatrick added that there is a huge potential in and a need for providing access to tech education and jobs to the growing aging population of Europe, too.


4. „It’s not even about the future anymore. It’s about now.”

Anna Ferenczy mentioned that while we are all aware of a growing global IT skills gap, there are also more than 3/4 of a million jobs in Europe that companies cannot fill today.

We must realise that everyone should be prepared for constant learning during careers. We don’t have the luxury anymore to only study in the beginning of our lives, and then work from that knowledge in the next 40 years. Due to constant and accelerating innovation jobs are continuously changing, so people need to change their skills, too. This will only get faster in the close future, so everyone should start upgrading their learning skills.

 

The 45-minute panel discussion could only scratch the surface of some key ideas and concepts shaping the future and present of digital reskilling in Europe.

 

The organiser DIGITALEUROPE, together with BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions also created a landmark film series, titled ‘Digitally Enlightened’, to help sharing great ideas and success stories across Europe. The series explores how a common vision would help digital innovation scale up and flourish to the benefit of consumers and companies.The series will also feature an episode about how Codecool is disrupting tech education in Europe to narrow down the digital skills gap and change people’s lives by helping them start their tech careers, at the same time.

Photos: DIGITALEUROPE

More Women into Tech!

There are still much fewer women participating in the software development projects of the future than what would be healthier for society. Learn how Codecool strives closing the gender gap in IT.

There are still much fewer women participating in the software development projects of the future than what would be healthier for society.

The IT sector has been struggling with gender diversity problems for a long time, and in spite of the fact that this issue has been discussed more and more often in recent years, no significant change has taken place. In Hungary, the rate of women working in the IT sector is still around 10-15%, which deeply underrepresents society – although by now it has become a fundamental truth that diversity is desirable on the basis of both moral and business considerations.

Technology and diversity

Technology influences all aspects of our lives from healthcare through traffic to personal relationships. Programming has an impact on an increasing proportion of our lives, while only a tiny minority of mankind understands code, algorithms and artificial intelligence. This small group of the population has an enormous responsibility for creating code that take the problems of entire societies and the differences within society into consideration , as well. An unbalanced representation of coders may indeed affect our future!

Most programmers, of course, do not create biased apps deliberately. But our own experience and past inevitably influence us when we make decisions; and such decisions are then integrated into the technology we build. It will form the way we live and might cause significant damage without diversity. For instance, underrepresented social groups may be put at disadvantage – including the social group of women.

But the lack of diversity raises not only ethical questions. It may significantly affect business results and innovation capability, as well.

“Several studies and our partners’ experience also prove that more diversified management teams are more likely to have higher profitability than companies run by homogenous C-level managers. The teams within Codecool also operate by putting this principle into practice: the proportion of our female managers is 50%. More diversified teams bring new points of view to the discussion and come up with alternative solutions that could not necessarily have been developed by a more homogenous group. The multilayered approach and the ability to solve problems more successfully contribute directly to better business performance at the end. We strive to provide our corporate partners with a more colourful and versatile coder and tech talent base in the well-known Codecool quality, so that they could benefit from the advantages of diversity, too,“ said Lea Kalocsai, Head of Sales at a leading Hungarian programming school Codecool.

Education is the key

There will be more female programmers only if more women are trained. However, in Hungary the rate of female students in IT training is only 10-15% today. This ratio is in line with the also ver low rate of women working in IT, and is still far from the 30% threshold, above which minorities do not feel disadvantaged.

There are still several stereotypes associated with coding. People tend to visualise coders as men wearing glasses and sitting in a dark room all day long. It’s a long process to change an image like this, and besides IT companies, educational institutions must also take an active part in changing this mindset.

“Codecool would like to make girls and women be aware of the fact that they are welcome in technological, digital and programmer training and career paths. As an open-minded, transparent company, we strive to get rid of the stereotypes connected to technology, programming and managerial roles in Central and Eastern Europe. One of our main objectives is to continue increasing the 20% rate of our female students – which otherwise even now exceeds the local averages in this sector – and to help a generation of much more diversified professionals and start-ups to start and develop their careers,“ says Codecool’s Head of Marketing, Anna Ferenczy.

From the economic performance’s point of view, it is crucial to have more and more coders in Hungary. Similarly to international trends, the number of IT graduates is less than the vacant positions in Hungary, too. There are about 22-22.5 thousand IT positions to be filled in the labour market, currently. From the aspect of companies’ competitveness and the establishment of social equality, it is essential to fill many of them by women in the future.

For more inspiration take a look at our blog post on Forbes’ ’30 Successfull Coder Women under 30’ list, and meet 11 super talented female coders who studied at Codecool.

This article was published on forbes.hu on 7 December 2020.,

„The old models are crumbling down” – we attended HR Fest 2020

The big yearly HR Fest conference in Hungary was last week, fully online for the first time ever. We were there, too, Codecool’s Head of Sales, Lea Kalocsai hosted the ToborZóna (RecruitZone) session room. One of our favourite events every year, touching also on subjects that matter for us most: training and sourcing of talents. In our case, tech talents, even with no IT background whatsoever.

After looking at the programme, we panicked. So. Many. Options. A main stage and 5 to 6 session rooms running in parallel. How will we ever not miss at least the most exciting stories and presenters? 

Obviously, we had to prioritise and choose. And we did just that. Still we ended up with running from session to session, and finally enough inspiration and ideas to think about for at least another week. 

So, we decided not to try dumping all of our insights summarised in one overview piece for you, as we wanted. Instead, we picked one of our favourite presentations that especially spoke to us, for a little dive-in.

Photo by Robert Markowitz

Steve Rader was one of the big stars of the event this year and for a reason. Being with NASA for more than 30 years, currently Deputy Director for the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation – his titles sounds quite impressive already.

If you listened to him at HR Fest Online in May, you also know that he is a passionate advocate of an open-talent world and crowd-sourcing innovation. These are concepts worth their own blog posts, so we would not go in detail about those at this time.

In his presentation at HR Fest 2020 Steve raised 3 specific ideas that especially resonated with us. We thought you might find them inspiring, too.

Idea #1: Innovation is no longer an option, but still a challenge 

Sounds like a cliché already? That’s totally right. But it’s a cliché many keep repeating and few take seriously yet. 

Steve says innovation is not about getting ahead in the race. It’s not some icing on the cake, some pet project to attend to when you have the time. Today you have to innovate just to keep up with everybody else. To remain competitive and relevant. It’s that black-and-white.

Digital innovation is faster and faster and is happening across domains. Just look at 3D printing used in prosthetics, mechanics, fashion or the food industry. Or machine vision used for picking produce in farming, for calibration in mechanics or for safety in autonomous vehicles.

Therefore, he suggests, your innovation problems may only be solved by innovation from out of your domain. You should employ brains coming from different domains (crowdsource innovation), and you should be able to come up with the right questions for others to solve.

Idea #2: Learn tech – even if it’s not your focus

From Steve’s line of thought at least 2 reasons can be derived about why it is wise to study technology. 

One, for innovation leaders: because you need to at least “speak a little bit of tech” even to raise the right questions. If you are not the person working on solutions, you are probably one of those defining the problem and putting the questions. If you try to do that without understanding technology, that is, the means of the solution to at least some extent, you will not get very far in the process.

Two, for innovators: because they need to have the overview, the tools and the mindset at hand to help solving today’s problems. Knowing tech is not just about knowing code. It’s so much more. It’s about understanding systems, logic patterns, how to connect dots, how to fail early and how to keep learning new things. 

Idea #3: Outsource selection and training – make your life easier

In Steve’s experience, efficient innovators or problem solvers have to learn in 60% of their time and work on problems in only 40%. But then in this 40% they will probably deliver as much as six times more value than without all that time spent on learning. Because learning boosts effectiveness via increasing skillset, creativity and motivation at the same time.

He believes in life-long learning and looking at learning as if it was part of your job. The right approach, he says, is „life-long learning built into and agile workforce that can actually adapt to the changing market place and the changing way of work.”

To achieve this, Steve suggests that companies should outsource selection, pre-onboarding and upskilling of the work force to release the growing pressure on HR. Centralised hubs partnering up with companies focused on solving challenges could do these much more efficiently, in his view. They are already up-to-date with all the skills required for the fast changing challenges, and they are not pressured by the business challenges on their shoulders. 

These three ideas confirm our belief that we are doing something really good at Codecool. Helping companies by training and sourcing their digital talents. Supporting life-long learning of future-proof skills. Enabling digitalisation. 

They also project an exciting, and probably very close future for all of us. Open-talent platforms. Crowd-sourced innovation. More freelancers than employees by 2027 on a global scale. New HR models and new company structures. „Passionate crowds, voluntarily joining to create and find out and contribute to solving challenges.” 

All-in-all, really truly exciting changes. 

We are ready for them. 

Are you?

Whether you need IT specialists or you are looking for company trainings, you will find the solution with us.

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