Unemployment around the world continues unabatedly, leaving young people facing challenges in finding a good job.
On the other side, the technology industry continues to grow at an accelerated pace however, companies across various sectors are facing a shortage of professionals with the prerequisite coding skills to fill their workforce needs.
According to the European Commission’s data, there were about 825,000 vacant positions in the information and communications technology sector in the EU in 2020. Around 58 per cent of the businesses are finding it hard to fill the vacancies with the right skills.
A solution to these challenges is to improve and support alternative IT training programs, besides traditional university courses. And that’s where Codecool comes into play.
Founded by Hungarian businessmen – Balázs Vinnai, Gabor Simon, Jozsef Boda in 2014, Codecool is a programming school and IT Talent Hubs in Central Europe that offers training for IT specialists, through its 3 to 12-month courses.
Secured €7M funding
Recently, the company has secured €7M funding from its new VC partner Integral Venture Partners and its earlier investors Lead Venture and PortfoLion Capital Partners. To date, the company has raised €12.5M
The Budapest-based company will use the funding for further product development and expansion. The programming school will also open two new campuses in Central Europe this year.
“The investment enables us to continue our European expansion. We’re planning to enter two new markets this year – we consider Austria, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Our target is to operate more than ten Codecool campuses by 2025,” says the CEO of Codecool József Boda. “Expansion, however, does not only mean increasing the number of our schools. Further developing our corporate re- and upskilling courses are also in our focus. Our experience shows that executives are increasingly open to train or reskill their existing employees, as it is often time-consuming and costly to find new experts with appropriate skills in the labour market.”
Solve digital talent shortage
Codecool’s mission is to solve the digital talent shortage for businesses and to provide new digital careers for individuals simultaneously. The company is continuously extending the range of its open courses.
On top of its full-stack course with a job guarantee, specialised 3 to 4-month online IT courses were added to the portfolio of the school last year. In 2025 the target number of graduates from the programming school will increase to several thousand per year, claims the company.
At present, the programming school operates in Hungary, Romania, and Poland, and over 1,000 of its graduates work in tech across Europe.
DIGITALEUROPE initiative
In December 2020, different vocational educational institutes, industry federations, and representatives of the private sector from Ireland to Greece like Amazon, Adecco, Nvidia, or Codecool joined forces to build a strategy to grow the European info-communication sector’s competitiveness through the development of programming skills.
The 4-year-long project is coordinated by DIGITALEUROPE and is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme. From Hungary Budapest, the University of Technology and Economics and ICT Association of Hungary joined the founders of ESSA besides Codecool.
