In Fundão we have been facing a problem of a mismatch between an emergent labor market (due to the recent placement of IT companies) and qualified human resources corresponding with the profile demanded.
In order to solve it, we improved facilities to attract software engineers from other regions and cities. We also realized that very few young students from Fundão choose that academic curriculum, and even with students coming from other cities, our local university and polytechnics didn´t have the critical mass to respond to this appeal from the labor market.
So, at the living lab partnership platform we began to enhance a strategy that brought us to the Code Academies answering to the initial problem in two different ways:
A: the Senior Academia de Codigo. Preparing, with an intensive retraining program (bootcamp), unemployed, graduated people from several fields with coding/programming/skills, transforming them into software developers in 14 weeks.
100% of developers participating in the first two bootcamps were contracted in two month.
B: the Junior Academia de Codigo. On the other hand, we realized that we needed to raise the interest for digital areas to keep students, thus introducing a curriculum option in primary school improving the cognitive and non cognitive skills as well as digital literacy. It aims at better preparing students for the jobs of the future, reducing unemployment risks. This is the junior academy that started last year with two pilot classes and is now (next October) going into all primary schools in Fundão.
If the Senior academy is a non formal concept of training that is achieving very good result indicators and is improving it´s implementation in several other cities and countries, the Junior academy is a product generated by a social innovation process, started out of Fundão, that we brought to our social innovation strategy and is assumed as a main project of our local community to promote the civil economy.
