Remote learning for upskilling

Coding Bootcamp Praha is a 12-week full-stack web development coding bootcamp in Prague, Czech Republic. 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.

The course aims at career changers who want their skillset to stay relevant on the changing market. The programme is the most affordable beginner-friendly bootcamp worldwide. This allows us to bring into the tech world a group of talented people who could not afford other market solutions. We offer a Job Guarantee Scheme. Our main current task is scaling remote solution to more people affected by the economic downturn. This way we can educate people anywhere and without need for relocation and they can apply for jobs locally. The below video is from one of our batches as we believe the programme is best represented by its own students.

The current economic downturn is affecting people across a number of verticals, including industries which used to be considered as stable (automotive or similar). In the generally lower skill level jobs in the service sector many people realised how unstable their jobs can be as they were fired from one day to another (especially in the US where the employee laws are less protectionist). However, we have started developing our solution not only in reaction to Covid-19 situation but already before. As a result of increased automation of many jobs, many employees fear they become redundant. Thus, our goal is providing such people with skills that empower them to become those who can create tech solutions and become relevant for new careers. The fear of becoming obsolete in the technology era is well-described by a number of publications, incl. MIT or others, eg. HERE, HERE. The media also refer to this topic frequently such as HERE. Thus, our mission is first finding ways for people to realise they have the potential to upscale their skills (by free educational content we provide) and later on to provide them with intense learning model to succeed at their career change.

The Coding Bootcamp Praha 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 bootcamp has been organized since autumn 2016. Each batch features 12 weeks fulltime, 420 teaching hours, 5 hackathons, 1 Demo Day and 20+ career counselling group and individual workshops. The emphasis is on understanding the best practices, learning by doing, and solving real-world problems.The success rate of the graduates is 90%. The strengths of our programmes include industry-tested curriculums, high graduate placement, international environment and a holistic approach. We guarantee our students they find a job in our job guarantee scheme. The bootcamp offers intense career counselling and an after-programme community. 

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. 

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 solution is a technology-based solution, which improves the skills of people, so that they can land high-paying high-skilled jobs in the tech industry / development teams in any industry. We teach our students sought-after skills to become fullstack, frontend (JS / React) or backend developers. Our students report significant increase in salaries within 12 months, typically more than double of their previous earnings. There has been a steady increase of software development jobs on any European or American market over the past decade, thus our graduate have a bright future in front of them for the years to come.

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, need for relocation, 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. 

The goal of scaling the remote option is utilising all the existing online educational tools - Zoom, Slack, and our own from scratch developed learning platform called Classes - and taking it one step further to provide as close in-class teaching experience as possible. We now currently testing few local VR solutions too.

The goal of scaling the remote option is utilising all the existing online educational tools - Zoom, Slack, and our own from scratch developed learning platform called Classes - and taking it one step further to provide as close in-class teaching experience as possible. We now currently testing few local VR solutions too. Our goal is allowing our students to study from their local homes without any need to feel lonely or compromising on the networking aspect of our in-class teachings.

We have a number of article on our blog related to how we deliver our teachings at the moment: https://codingbootcamp.cz/blog. The above described visions are being tested and evaluated.

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.

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 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

The organisation is based in Czech Republic, however, we have students and alumni from more than 35 countries. As we are now expanding our online classroom option, our goal is offering our service anywhere in the world. However, since time zone plays a role for live teaching we plan to focus more on Europe / Africa and parts of Asia.

The current number of people we’re serving: 

- impact of our teaching activities: 6000 

- impact of our free materials and publications: 50000

The number we’ll be serving in one year: 

- impact of our teaching activities: 15000 

- impact of our free materials and publications: 150000

The number we’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 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 have described our solution as a part of the previous question.

Fulltime staff: 4

Partime staff: 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 our 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.

We believe our entire mission and all our activities are directly contributing the main goal of this prize as our solution enables working-age adults to build the skills and resources they need to access well-paying jobs in a changing marketplace.