Akbank Youth Academy and Patika.dev have added 150 new talent to the tech sector

About Akbank Youth Academy

Akbank Youth Academy supports young people with trainings in technology for the competencies of the future by collaborating with leading companies and social enterprises. Through different projects, training and programs sponsored by Akbank Youth Academy, new generation of tech talent is empowered and prepared for future digital skills in the best way possible.

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Program Summary

As Akbank Youth Academy and Patika.dev, we annually design bootcamps in the most in-demand technologies. At the end of each year, we come together, discuss the following year’s talent demand, set the goals, and create a timeline. In the past two years, 7,000+ candidates signed up for our five bootcamps: Two full stack web development (.Net+React), one Java Spring development, one React front end web development, and one React Native mobile development bootcamp. These bootcamps trained in total 150 new talent for the growing tech industry; and two of these classes specifically targeted female talent.

1. Reaching out to the target group: Akbank Youth Academy aims to design programs for university students or fresh graduates from all over Turkey. To ensure fair access to opportunities, it is crucial to announce the program all over the country, reach out to people from all cities, collect applications and find the best-fit participants.

2. Helping to increase women ratio among developers: According to TalentGrid report, the current female developer ratio in Turkey is ~12% in all developers. To increase the female representation among the tech sector, one of the most important requirements is to make trainings balanced in gender.

3. Content of trainings should prepare the participants for today's and future competencies and help them to get a job: There are plenty of trainings on the internet or private courses. But many of them are designed only for theoretical content and mostly do not help participants to find a job. These trainings should cover theoretical content, practices and professional point of view to support them while searching for a job.

At the beginning of each year, Akbank Youth Academy and Patika.dev come together to plan the bootcamps and marketing strategies to reach the right group of candidates and set the selection criteria in advance.

Patika.dev is the biggest developer community in Turkey with 100,000+ followers on social media and 130,000 learners on the Patika.dev e-learning platform. This community is spread all over Turkey with different skillsets and career aspirations. So, it is important to clearly explain the program content and selection criteria to the community, and receive applications from the right group of candidates for each program.

For each bootcamp, we have a 3-week application period where we run several campaigns on social media and in partnership with our university partners.

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In each step we aimed to effectively explain the background of Akbank Youth Academy, the aim of the program, and the eligibility criteria.

To support women in tech, we designed two bootcamps only for women, set the target group as women and conducted all above activities for this specific group.

We design bootcamps to give qualified technical training, support it with many homeworks and projects, and improve participant’s profession such as CV, Linkedin, Github and interview feedback.

The five bootcamps received 7,000 applications in totalIn two years, we trained 150 young people and 75% of these bootcamp graduates found a job in many important technology companies within a couple of months of their graduation.

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