From our experience of having interacted with hundreds of students and many academic institutions, over the years, the hard truth established is that there’s a gap between the talent/skills the industry needs and what the education system is imparting. On industry’s part, it is tough to prepare the students for consumption. It requires their resources, the most precious being time and a culture where education is the driving force to nurture talent. It requires the motivation of employees to teach and take interest in other person’s growth.

India’s recent past saw a growth in the IT sector when the jobs flourished. These required a different kind of skill and talent. Something that could be harnessed from all engineers be it civil, mechanical, computers, electrical alike. All it required was a degree or elementary skills. In our opinion, companies like Infosys and TCS got a lot of reception based on this. But the industry is changing and the job requirements have changed since then. For a software development company, the emphasis is on building right products the right way, and a candidate must possess very sound computer science fundamentals and hands-on experience to be able to contribute.

Coming back to the gap, the requirements now have indeed left for a need to prepare and train the students either during their education or in the industry. And we believe we can only make change or create impact where we can take control and do something. As a part of the industry, we take responsibility to undo the harm and to decrease the gap. It is not a random act of heroism, our need for talented people to do great work aligns with their need to do meaningful work. There’s a synergy.

The good thing is that we have worked towards putting in place a system that enables us to do this. We launched bootcamps which are free of cost for the students – where we reach out to the colleges and run training programs that last 2-3 days to impart skills around software development. But we also realised while running these bootcamps that there was a need for longer engagement. And on many occasions students approached us with requests to spend more time with us. This led us to launch preparatory programs which we run for quick learners who somehow couldn’t do much in computer science but appear promising. Periodically, we take a few students who spend from a week to 10 days in an unconventional setup to learn everything they can to become great software engineer. And ofcourse we don’t charge the students for this kind of exposure. The students work on some of the open-source projects (which then helps the community as well apart from helping themselves) during this time.

We have prepared a 4 stage program and the students try to reach up to the level where they are confident of their skills and can add value to the industry. This Preparatory Program is also a great way to increase their chances to have a career with us later.

The preparatory program and CodeTrek bootcamps is our way of giving back to the community and we’re happy to have made impact in many student’s lives with this.

 

Satender Rawat:
“After graduating as a computer science student I was excited to jump in to start building things. In my few days here i’ve got my hands in technologies like bootstrap, git, laravel. Building a software with the team was a great experience of working in a friendly environment. I was excited for the opportunity to showcase my talent and learn technical as well as life lessons from them.”

Mohit Gusain:
“I have always wanted to contribute to an open source project. With a deeper understanding of technologies like Laravel and better familiarity with version control system(git), I was able to solve real problems and contribute to one of the open-source projects which definitely added a lot of my confidence. I enjoyed the learning culture, and the mentorship I received from the team. I feel very positive and am sure this will be a great chapter for my future.”