EdTech Platform for girls and women

We organise two main activities - coding education for adults and for kids. We change the mindset that coding skills are for a small group of specialists or math geeks only. Our youth programmes target ages of 10-14 - the age when our idea of our university or career choices start to get formed.

Our teaching is delivered through both offline fulltime classes as well as through our online platform, which we designed and developed ourselves to be easily scalable. How can our students successfully change careers and become programmers? The most important is to switch the way they think. 

For our current activities we received multiple prestigious awards, including European Edition Finalist of IIC by MIT or #1 educational programme by the European Commission.

Our model has been established as an alternative option to gain comprehensive and practical programming skills in a short period of time. This solution has been designed to improve the skills gap in the market - by educating new IT workers ready to be employed. 

The job market has reported a significant shortage of programmers for nearly a decade and the demand has been ever increasing. What is more is that only 5 - 10 % are women. However, the general educational systems across the world typically do not offer any other option to get qualified for working in IT than studying at a university. For people who wish to get into the field this implies investing time and finances (also in terms of opportunity costs) into 3-5 year-long studies. To help our students to decide to make the career change we implemented the Job Guarantee Scheme - We guarantee that they find a job or we refund their tuition.

Our most visible programme is the Coding Bootcamp Praha, which is a 12-week full-stack web development coding bootcamp in Prague, Czech Republic, which targets career changers. The programme is the most affordable coding bootcamp in the world, which accepts beginners. We invented a model of quality and affordability. This allows us to bring into the tech world a group of people who are highly interested in the switch, however, could not afford the other market solutions. Thus, this group would stay out of the IT world. 

With our extensive experience of in-person teaching we decided to scale our solution to allow the much broader audience to benefit from programming skills. That was the reason why we developed our online platform to allow our students to learn remotely. 

Based on experience and research we realised that women are disadvantaged to become programmers. Currently there are only 5 - 10 % of female programmers and therefore our current focus is on educating women in programming. 

The bootcamp is a life-changing experience for our graduates. Coding Bootcamp Praha provides them with a "coding family" - before, during and after the programme. Our students come from all walks of life and all across the world - our alumni come from more than 35 countries. The average age of our students is 28.5 years, with a spread between 18 years to 44 years.

The programme is also sought-after by start-up founders who create a MVP of their product during the Final Project.

Our impact is measured in the following ways:

1) The number of graduates who successfully land a job as programmers: 92 %

2) Number of women we bring to the tech world: we have 35% female students

3) A number of companies that act like our hiring partners: +35

4) Size of our alumni & supporters community: +6000 active members

5) Number of free events we organise per year: +25

6) Number of coding bootcamps we organise per year: 3

7) The average increase in salary (within 12 months of graduation compared to the last job before the bootcamp): +114

Our goal is enabling people who cannot relocate to benefit from our trainings too.

Our long term vision is that girls and women can learn programming to improve their lives - personally as well as professionally. Data4You, the organiser of the Coding Bootcamp Praha, currently evaluates partners for international expansion to bring its teaching method and our efficient organisational model to other locations. Our goal is spreading our method to make programming skills available to everyone - regardless their previous experience, age, gender or income. Data4You has built an English-taught web development program, which has been established as a proven method for getting into web development by reputable employers.

There is a number of ‘teach coding’ initiatives around the world - on-line as well as off-line solutions. The two main differentiators are the quality of their teaching model and price. Any teaching model can be objectively evaluated based on 1) the outcomes, 2) quality of instructors, 3) industry expectations. Coding Bootcamp Praha is among the top coding bootcamps in the world when outcomes are evaluated - as defined by our high graduate hiring rate and income change. Our graduates tend to be sought after actively by any HR long prior to their graduation. 

As a non-profit organisation our goal is that coding bootcamps can be attended by participants of all income categories. The Tuition Fee we charge is as basic as it can possibly be, 4-5 cheaper to any comparable coding bootcamp in the world. We emphasize the word ‘comparable’ because we do not compromise quality in any way.

Our teaching is delivered through both offline fulltime classes as well as through our online platform, which we designed and developed ourselves to be easily scalable. How can our students successfully change careers and become programmers? The most important is to switch the way they think. The bootcamp empowers the students to transition into the software development mindset in three phases - The Coder, The Programmer and The Developer.

Thanks to our passionate instructors and mentors they learn how to create fullstack web application in JavaScript and PHP. We teach the students step by step how to combine the frontend and backend technologies, from the basics of HTML and CSS through advanced frameworks and libraries, including React and Laravel. Through project work they learn how to set up the best user interfaces, create secure, robust and scalable applications, store big amounts of data in databases and become a Git master.

Our impact is measured in the following ways:

1) The number of graduates of the Coding Bootcamp Praha who successfully land a job as programmers: 160+

2) Number of women we bring to the tech world: we have 30-35% women in our adult programmes and 50% girls in our youth programmes

3) A number of companies that act like our hiring partners: +35

4) Size of our alumni & supporters community: +2000 active members

5) Number of free events we organise per year: +20

6) Number of coding bootcamps we organise per year: 3

7) Percentage of children who return to advanced workshops after completing intro sessions: 78

8) The average increase in salary (within 12 months of graduation compared to the last job before the bootcamp): +112

Student Types Based on Their Background and Motivation:

 1. Career-Changers. Motivation? To find a more fulfilling, creative and/or better paid job.

2. Students or Fresh Graduates of Non-Tech Degrees. Motivation? Quickly improve their lack of tech skills.

3. Entrepreneurs. Motivation? To create a minimum viable product of their project idea that they can present to investors and to be able to manage the development team.

4. Employee-innovators. Motivation? An alternative to MBA for personal development and understanding the technology world.

We work with our participants over a long period. Many of them first encounter our programme at a stage when they do not yet believe such change is feasible for them. At the beginning level we provide educational content through our blog or social media. The next level is someone who already shows interest in coding but does not yet have any knowledge. This participant has the opportunity to attend our free online of in-person few hour workshops to learn the basics of programming. Afterwards, there are few options - 1) student decides they want to dive deeper asap; 2) student needs to research bit more for some period; 3) student decides this industry is not for them. For student 1) the student can continue studying at our fulltime programme. For student 2) they can attend more of our workshops or online lessons, keep on reading content in free time and in most cases they later go for the fulltime option to accelerate their progress. The student 3) is grateful they learn something new but they see themselves in other areas. Our fulltime programme students apply for jobs towards the end of the programme and get hired as junior developers. Around 15% of our students do come back to the programme as act as a mentor (some for few days, some for few weeks). Over a longer span some of these students joined us as part-time instructors. This cycle is extremely important for the change to happen over a long period of time.

The current number of people you’re serving: 

- impact of our teaching activities: 6000 

- impact of our free materials and publications: 50000

The number you’ll be serving in one year: 

- impact of our teaching activities: 15000 

- impact of our free materials and publications: 150000

The number you’ll be serving in five years.: 

- impact of our teaching activities: 50000 

- impact of our free materials and publications: 1-2 mil

The job market has reported a significant shortage of programmers for nearly a decade and the demand has been ever increasing. Thus, we are now working on delivering our in person model fully remotely, which partially works via tools such as Zoom, Slack etc, however, we aim to go further and utilise also VR tools in our daily teaching activities. Our current plan is to kick off the optimised online classroom in Q3 of 2021.

Our main goal is to scale our quality education to the broad international audience, which mean that we are going to operate from the Czech Republic and bring our education model to broad number of countries. 

Our success is based on the quality of our team members - instructors who are both technically experienced as well as great at teaching others. We can have the best teaching materials and streamlined processed, however, it is the role of the actual instructor to make each day as captivating as possible. Our biggest risk is not selecting carefully our new team members, which potentially could lower the perceived quality of the brand. Thus, we want o further improve our mentors in-company programmes.

Secondly, a similar risk can arise from an unsuitable partner cooperation with local companies who are not equipped to hire junior programmers. However, at the current economic climate the second risk is rather theoretical. Yet, we are ready for this scenario and prepare our graduates holistically - providing them with a competitive edge regardless of the current tech trends. 

Finally, we identify a risk of the coding bootcamp name being "destroyed" by for-profit coding bootcamps who have scaled at an uncontrollable rate resulting in a number of already recorded cases of unhappy students and failed programmes. However, we trust we have already built a community big enough that our results speak for themselves. Nonetheless we see that our role is also educating the market itself about the right expectations of the coding bootcamp model through traditional and social media.

We described how to overcome these barriers in our previous answer. 

Full-time staff: 4

Part-time staff: 3

Contractors: 3

Data4You z.s. is an NGO registered in Prague, Czech Republic and active since its foundation in April 2014. Any money raised is re-invested back into our programmes to support our vision of growing digital society. 

The Data4You team includes 15 mentors and instructors and 5 marketing and other supportive roles. We also cooperate with a number of external experts for both technical tasks as well as marketing and PR. For specific topics and hackathons we also invite experts from tech companies. Below we include more information on the executive team.

Jana Večerková, Founder & Director

Short BIO: Jana  has worked as a UX designer, programme director, business developer, and a moderator all across the world.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janavecerkova

Jan Večerka, Co-Founder

Short BIO: Honza is the co-founder of Data4You. He is responsible for the financial management, business development & strategy.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janvecerka

Jan Polák, Co-Founder, Lead Instructor

Short BIO: With more than 15 years of experience in web development, there are few things Honza has not come into contact with or problems he was unable to solve. His passion: to pass his experience forward, to the students of programming.

LinkedIn: https://cz.linkedin.com/in/janpolak82

Slavomír Kožár, Instructor

Short BIO: Backend developer and longterm mentor. Slavo graduated with an MSc in Software Engineering at the Czech Technical University.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slavokozar/

Martin Podloucký, Instructor

Short BIO: Martin a professional lecturer and software engineer. He hold MSc in Theoretical Computer Science.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ma...

We are a member of the DigiKoalice, the Czech national Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, which helps us discuss any trending topics and a member of TechSoup, an international network that helps non-profits. We built a network of 35 hiring partners, ie. organisations that are ready to hire career changers who switch into programming jobs. All these partners also help us out with spreading the word about our common mission.

Our activities are paid by contributions of our participants and we have been financially independent since the beginning of our project.

Between 2014 -2016 the organisation was funded with personal savings of the founding members and acquired occasional small sponsorship from corporate partners (eg SAP and Komercni banka) for specific events. Since end of 2016 we started running our main programme where students contribute to their Tuition Fee and we utilise a volunteer network who donate their time for a good cause. We also utilise several NGO discounts for software products. Currently we are at a sustainable financial position, our incomes do cover all our costs. However, our position does not allow us to expand our services to a wider range of audience, which is why we are currently looking for more partnerships and other sources of funding.

We are looking for business and marketing mentoring and support to help us scale our solution as quickly as possible. This also includes expanding our team, thus support for talent recruitment would be useful for us. We are also looking into other sources of funding, including venture capital, thus also strategic advice would be great. We are also interested in media / conference exposure for our solutions to get the word to those who could most benefit from it.

Currently we are at a sustainable financial position, our incomes do cover all our costs. However, our position does not allow us to expand our services to a wider range of audience, which is why we are currently looking for more partnerships and other sources of funding.

Our vision is that girls and women can learn programming to improve their lives - personally as well as professionally. Data4You, the organiser of the Coding Bootcamp Praha, currently evaluates partners for international expansion to bring its teaching method and our efficient organisational model to other locations. Our goal is spreading our method to make programming skills available to everyone. Data4You has built an English-taught web development program, which has been established as a proven method for getting into web development by reputable employers.

Our vision is that girls and women can learn programming to improve their lives - personally as well as professionally. Data4You, the organiser of the Coding Bootcamp Praha, currently evaluates partners for international expansion to bring its teaching method and our efficient organisational model to other locations. Our goal is spreading our method to make programming skills available to everyone. Data4You has built an English-taught web development program, which has been established as a proven method for getting into web development by reputable employers.