Germany's YouGrow Academy is helping funnel female talent into the IT gap

March 4, 2020
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The Information Technology (IT) sector has been considered a male domain, and the proportion of female students studying computer science has been falling for years. According to the Federal Employment Agency, the female quota among IT professions was only 16% in 2018. 

In the early days of computer development, programming was once considered a female profession - a curious historical shift, especially since the shortage of skilled workers is causing German companies more and more problems.

According to the industry association Bitkom, only every seventh applicant (15%) is female when it comes to IT specialist jobs. At the same time, 55% of employers want to increase the proportion of women among their own IT specialists. One of the goals of the YouGrow Academy in Frankfurt is therefore to get more women enthusiastic about IT professions and to help give them access.

"In our boot camps we currently have a women quota of 30-40 percent," explains Axel Weber, head of the YouGrow Academy. "The compressed dual training concept offers our graduates an easy entry into the exciting IT professions with excellent career opportunities."

A good example of the success of YouGrow training is Trang Vu Huyen. The young Viet-German has long been enthusiastic about information technology, but she also had concerns as a woman to gain access to the IT industry. Therefore, she first studied economics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and then worked in the online marketing of an e-commerce firm, but still itched to get into programming and IT management.

Trang Vu Huyen has been completing the master's degree in IT management at the FOM University of Economics & Management since 2018. In 2019 she then switched from her previous employer to Tempo-Team. Here, she begins the intensive training of the YouGrow Academy as a software developer. At the same time, she can continue her part-time studies at FOM.

"Later I would like to work as an IT consultant or in IT management," Trang Vu Huyen professes. “The master’s degree at FOM offers a good basis for this, but I have not yet had deeper insights into the practice of software development. Thanks to YouGrow, I can now acquire in-depth knowledge of programming and IT project management in a very short time. Employment at Tempo-Team Personnel Services enables me to secure my livelihood and gain practical work experience at the same time."

The likelihood of being hired in the operational company after the end of the training is also very high.

The training of the YouGrow Academy is divided into three phases: a 4-week preparation based on training material and e-learning is followed by an 8-week intensive IT boot camp in Frankfurt, and the final practical phase in project deployment of up to 18 months in one of the partner companies.

The training content in the IT boot camp includes the development of training applications using Spring, Springboot, Angular and MySQL, versioning with Git and GitHub, object-oriented programming (OOP), programming with Java (frontend & backend) and Eclipse, the introduction to relational Database models, the introduction to web development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Angular as well as agile project management including preparation for Scrum certification.

March 4, 2020

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