Recode

Recode Pro program aims to democratize access to quality training in full-stack programming for people in a socially vulnerable situation from 18 to 39 years old and also contributes to the referral of graduated students to the labor market in the technology area, it is one of the most promising areas with the most attractive salaries in the market. Recode Pro is performed 100% online with a proposal for a methodology based on collaboration and on the construction of projects to solve social problems. Over 540 hours, of course, young people develop digital skills, technical skills in front-end and back-end programming, and soft skills skills, mainly creativity, communication, and professional performance.

We understand that technology represents a possibility of generating income and economic emancipation, as the sector grows and has attractive salaries.

The program has a strong diversity component as we prioritize blacks, women, LGBTQI+, and PWDs as main audiences.

Brazil is the 89th most unequal out of 93 countries in a 3-year average of the Gini Index. World Bank points out that 25 million young people are in economic disengagement in Brazil, neither studying nor working. A study by Google and Mckinsey highlights that the country's GDP could increase up to 70 billion dollars if the right investment was made for building capacity in technology.

The World Economic Forum’s Report (2020) revealed that 84% of employers are accelerating their digitalization agenda and 50% of employers intend to accelerate the automation of jobs. The same year, Brazil reach more than 12 million unemployed people, and the situation is expected to worsen with the growing use of technology, with more than 50% of the jobs likely to be replaced by existing technologies.  Companies are having trouble finding talent in tech, with more than 160,000 vacancies unfilled, more than 420,000 new openings expected by 2024 in Brazil. 

Democratizing access to qualified training in technology is our strategy to promote the productive inclusion of people in the labor market. 

The Recode Pro program aims to training and employing people aged
from 18 to 39, in social vulnerability, as full-stack programmers.
In addition to technical content, skills such as creativity,
communication, and professional performance are developed, and the
proposed methodology is based on collaboration and the development
of projects to solve social problems.
The purpose of the Program is to provide people socially vulnerable
with the opportunity to acquire knowledge and develop a professional
career in technology. For that, Recode Pro:
• Offers technical knowledge for work in technology and motivates the
participant to seek continuous development;
• Stimulates a critical view on social issues, and empowers the search
for sustainable and inclusive solutions, using technology as a tool;
• Facilitates the development of socio-emotional skills and
competencies for the 21st century: empathy, self-knowledge, problemsolving, collaboration, communication, and creativity;
• Proposes the use of the acquired knowledge in the development of
projects and applications, focused on solving social problems
previously identified by the own students;
• Simulates immersive experience in the world of work;
• Connects impact investors, employers, and educators with the same purpose; 

• Monitors the career and development of trained students, and seeks, to involve them as an example for future participants.

The focus of the Recode Pro program is the training and employability of people aged 18 to 39 in socially vulnerable situations. At least 51% of our participants are black, 41% are women and, as a tiebreaker, LGBTQIA+ will have priority, unless the people who would make up this percentage do not reach the minimum grades in the classification stages.

Our beneficiaries of the program come from families that earn up to 1 minimum wage per month. Primarily young people who studied in public schools.
These young people are discredited by the future and when they get to the course, they see the opportunity to enter the job market in the technology area. The great impact on these young people's lives is that at least 80% of them are hired by large companies with great career plans already earning,  at the beginning of their career, around 4 minimum wages per month, 4 times more than their entire family previously earned, providing a significant improvement in quality of these young people and their families.

With our program, young people in social vulnerability guarantee their employability, as we give them all the support after training for their insertion in the labor market, thus guaranteeing them the long-awaited achievement of autonomy.

At the end of the course our students:
• Contribute to diversity policies with the inclusion of contracting companies
• Act as junior developers or entrepreneurs
• They are potential agents of transformation of society

We are in agreement with the T Prize proposal to offer training and flexible curriculum in hard (technical) and soft (social and interpersonal) skills, preparing people for the work of the future, as the Recode Pro program offer a methodology to develop digital skills and socioemotional competencies in young people, stimulating the new generation protagonism and potential as agents of social transformation. We create initiatives to support the insertion of low-income youth in the technology area, one of the most promising and with great demand for vacancies in Brazil. We have training trails that develop both digital and socio-emotional skills. 

The project has been growing since it was created in 2019 with the first two classes in the face-to-face model, in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Serving as a pilot project, to test the methodology and understand how the market behaves. Later in 2020, during the pandemic, we understood that it was necessary to continue this project and we virtualized the process 100%, offering online classes with monitors who could monitor the development of these students, and we held 4 more classes, maintaining the same city. . Also during the pandemic, with the increase in remote work, we saw the opportunity to expand the scope and extend the reach of the project, reaching new states and new students. That's why we are in this growth phase. Our goal is, in 20 months, to graduate 720 students.

What makes us innovative is our capacity to adapt to the scenario. During the pandemic, the world realized even more, how important technology is to connect people and boost economic growth. Our program has adapted to the pandemic, virtualizing our processes, transforming classes into 100% online.

Also, our solution adapts to new markets, as well as the behavior of the labor market in the technology area in the country. The program's innovation is directly linked to our methodology. The Recode Pro program is innovative because it brings a different look, it takes the young person on a journey where he sets himself up as a programmer with a purpose because at the end of the course he becomes an agent of change (tec change maker). With his technical skills, he manages to enter the job market, but always with a focus on solving social problems, on how he can give back to the communities where they live and in the world, seeking solutions to these social issues.

 Another innovation is our always open listening process with different stakeholders, because year after year we review our program content to understand what are the technical skills and market demands, easily adapting our content, both soft skills, with hard skills.

-We offer, in preparation for the course, since our students do not need to have prior knowledge in the area of technology, preparatory content, which is the free courses in our virtual learning environment (VLE), with more than 14 training tracks that offer digital skills content, from basic to introductory to programming.

- Application of technical concepts in the construction of projects with online support from teachers and monitors

- Hackathons where students work in squads to create solutions using technology.

- Use of problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity methodologies

- 360° feedback rounds
- Technical assessment by the learning module

- Online talent fair dedicated preferably to companies that sponsored the program, including:

- the Pitch of the companies
- the final pitch of student projects
- Individual interviews
Our Recode Pro platform:
- Supports candidates in the selection process
- Contains CV, portfolio, and performance in the Bootcamp of students 
- Track career progression
- Facilitates recruitment 

We understand that our methodology manages to develop in young people technical skills and socio-emotional skills based on reports made with performance indicators and student results that measure both technical results and socio-emotional abilities. We also identify that the virtualization of the process worked and that all the tools used, both on the platform and in online classes, as the monitoring of the monitors worked as well since we have an evasion percentage of 17% of young people, well below the average evasion of online courses, which is 50%. In addition, employing more than 80% of a class means that the training perfectly meets market demand and we also have positive feedback from recruiters.
Another way to prove the efficiency of the program is the satisfaction of the sponsors, some are already in the second consecutive sponsorship group.
The great demand of young people looking for the program also demonstrates the success of our program, in 2020 there were more than 10 thousand registered for 220 places. This shows that our technology engages young people to want to participate in our courses.

The biggest risk of adopting a 100% online for training courses is to ensure the student engagement throughout the process. And to ensure that young people complete the journey, Recode has developed strategies such as providing mentors who accompany these students so that they can have support to resolve doubts outside of class hours. We also enable the creation of virtual spaces for the exchange of experiences and support among students, an online community that works as extra motivation for them. 

In the 2021 edition, more than 9,000 people enrolled were impacted
who participated in the selection process and took 2 courses at Recode. 1300 people benefited from the Hackathon and 360 young people who will be trained and sent to the job market. Next year, we expect to maintain this same number of people impacted. In 5 years, we expect to serve at least twice as many young people as we currently do.

Our impact for the next year is to maintain the number of vacancies for 360 young people, also to maintain our employability target above 80% of young employees and in 5 years we expect to have an impact, in addition, to double the number of young people, to have developed features for being able to receive new audiences of people with disabilities, disabilities that today we are not able to attend by the program. We will also work to increase other quotas, in addition to PCDs, such as blacks, women, and LGBTQI+

Our evaluation of the Recode Pro project is done as follows:

 - Monitoring of process indicators related to the formation of Recode (numbers of participation and completion in our tracks) and the perception of graduates concerning self-development.
- Survey of result indicators referring to skills developed by participants through training and satisfaction with the content and methodology applied.

OUR ASSESSMENTS:

• Process
• Product
• Impact
• Economic return

OBJECTIVE GOALS:

•  Registrations
•  Evasion
•  Employability and average salary

BASELINE: 

• Education
• Employability
• Technology knowledge level
• Socio-emotional skills

ENDLINE: 

• Education
• Employability
• Technology knowledge level
• Socio-emotional skills
•  Program evaluation

POST ENDLINE: 

• Employability
• Salary
• Study
• Consumer habits
• Work experience and use of soft and hard skills

ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT:

• Comparison of treatment group and control group (students x enrolled)
• Measure of actual impact
• Calculation of the financial return for the investor (time required for the program to pay for itself)

Working directly on this project we have around 10 full-time staff and 1 part-time staff

We have a highly qualified team that has already developed several projects for Recode, and for the past 26 years has reached more than 1,8 million individuals worldwide with its educational programs and technology-based programs.

 Recode has been a pioneer in bringing the discussion on re-skilling and upskilling, ensuring ethics and values in the use of exponential technologies, and delivering innovative projects using Virtual Reality, gamification, distance education, access to the internet, youth and women’s employability, and social entrepreneurship programs to inspire agents of social transformation. 

Recode is also affiliated with the largest global networks of social entrepreneurs in the world, such as Ashoka, Skoll, Schwab, and Avina Foundation

We know that in an increasingly globalized market, diversity in a company goes beyond respecting and accepting differences. It is essential to understand that a team with different profiles is richer in talent, improves the company's results, and contributes to business success.
In addition, we invest heavily in a multidisciplinary team, as our country has a multiplicity of races, religions, ethnicities, etc. fulfill their social role. Such investment brings good visibility in the community — in which the organization is inserted — and encourages other companies to do the same.

The cash prize would help us to pay for the translation of the platform into English and Spanish and so we could scale the program to other countries, but TPrize still helps us to scale the program to increase the number of beneficiaries as it will introduce us to a network of partners who could, in the future, be interested in being part of our sponsorship team.

We need more sponsorship to be able to increase the number of classes, thus increasing the number of people impacted by the project in scale.

The profile of partner we are looking for are companies interested in sponsoring education and employability projects and also interested in absorbing our graduated students into their work team.