Recently, we sat down with Damany Fisher, a Regional Director of Special Projects for the Bay Area Community College Consortium. Damany shared great insights into his passion for helping students of all backgrounds with education and employment opportunities. 

Learning can take many forms throughout a lifetime. There are times when you learn to speak and write, through repetition and reinforcement. There are moments when you learn a new sport such as soccer and you must go onto the field, kick a ball around, do drills and exercises, and actually play the game to learn. In some instances, you learn by teaching.

Throughout your life you will learn, unlearn, relearn and continue this process multiple times. One thing that has adapted over time is the need for active learning. The old learning models of passive learning and lectures are not reflective of what the workforce needs or what employers demand anymore. One of the biggest downfalls to this form of learning is the increase in achievement gaps amongst students. If everyone is being taught the same, everyone needs to have the same opportunity to learn, but everyone learns differently and traditional learning methods don't accommodate for this well at all.

As a company, we have always strived to further development through education and growth with our partners. We have had several successful partnerships that have garnered immense support in the education sphere.

Our program, pricing, and skills-based model are so uniquely aligned with the vision and goals of community colleges that we have begun partnering with community colleges to provide our programs as not-for-credit and for-credit options as part of their workforce training efforts.

We are excited to announce our new partnership with Cañada Community College at Menlo Park. This public-private partnership with Cañada Community College will allow us to provide our low cost, high quality coding programs to rapidly train a more diverse workforce.

Recently, we sat down with Jason Syu, an Applications Engineer at NVIDIA, to talk about his journey into a career at NVIDIA, what it means to be an Applications Engineer, and what software engineers should know about working in the hardware industry. Jason also shared some insights with our learners about finding a career in the tech industry.

We sat down, virtually of course, with one of our alumni, Justin Burnett. Community is a big part of the learning experience here at Qwasar. We wanted to give you an idea of the depth and breadth of who is in our alumni community. This interview is a part of ongoing learner interviews of our Qwasar alumni. Read more to learn about the life of a Qwasar alumni!

Based on the success of last year’s summer coding program, we have decided to run it again this summer. 2020 was a year of triumphs and shifts in everyones lives and this program was one that proved successful for many looking to advance their programming skills and get into software jobs. The remote and hands-on nature of our program allows you to code from anywhere. Your learning is entirely 100% accessible to you. Maybe you didn’t get an internship you really wanted or maybe you want to get better at coding, programming, software architecture, or your code quality. Whatever the reason is, let Qwasar be the solution to helping you achieve your goals in tech this summer.

Veterans, the men and women who have served their country are especially great at a lot of things. 

What is C Programming?

You've probably heard of C programming or you're wondering whether or not to spend the time learning the language. C programming is defined as one of the most powerful "modern" programming language, in that it allows direct access to memory and many low-level computer operations.

C is one of the lowest level languages that is still fairly readable (compared to binary code with 0's and 1's). It allows you to exploit some of the features of a computer's hardware with far more control and precision that higher level languages. A high level language would be something such as JavaScript or Python, where a significant number of libraries and functions are essentially "pre-built" and take care a lot of under-the-hood functionality but very limited precision or control.

We interviewed with TechMission in Kyiv, Ukraine to learn more about their goals and the market for tech talent in Ukraine. We are so excited to partner with TechMission!

Tell us a bit about yourselves and your background.

Alex, Co-Founder of TechMission: I have been working in the tech industry since 2013. During that time, I’ve had a chance to work on different roles and management positions and to implement a set of neat complex solutions for products in various industries: InsurTech, HealthCare, IT tools, Finances, e-Commerce/CRM. For the last 3.5 years, I have been leading my service company MasterDynamix where we help businesses to build their great tech products.

 

Diana, Founder of TechMission: I have been working in the IT Education industry since 2014. During that time I have been launching and running courses for the following profiles: web and mobile development, QA, web design and 2D art, digital marketing, and IT recruitment. 10 years ago, the IT Education market of various specialists was only at its first steps, so different Ukrainian tech companies were easily hiring such graduates. With the growth of the industry, the number of private IT Education courses has increased, hence we have more and more people willing to become IT specialists. Nowadays, tech companies not only require theoretical knowledge from junior-level applicants, they expect such applicants to have practical experience. My additional activity is the preparation and coaching of IT Education graduates for their interviews and getting a first tech job.

Do you believe there is a need for tech talent in Ukraine?

During the last several years we observe a harsh competition in head hunting of tech talents in Ukraine. The industry has grown 26% in 2020 and estimated $4.7 billion. Still, it continues to grow, the salaries are on the high rise as well, and we tend to see a big lack of good developers and engineers.

What would tech talent mean for Ukraine?

According to our experience, every tech company in Ukraine has different standards of the Software Engineering/QA/BA/PM etc. For example, small service companies are ready to hire less experienced developers in order to keep the margin while running Time&Material contracts with foreign clients, while tech product companies or heavily-invested startups are mainly interested in top-notch engineers and tend to pay higher salaries.

How long does it take to become a software developer in Ukraine right now?

Local IT schools have really various sets of programs and tracks. Some of them give you false promises that you’ll become a software engineer in 2-3 months, while the others are ready to teach and mentor you for 6-12 months.

How would you describe the market for tech talent in the Ukraine?

Even though there is a lack of good engineers, the HR market is full of unqualified talents that would like to change their current careers and become software engineers, QA engineers, UI/UX designers or IT Project Managers. The reason is pretty simple, an average Middle-level developer makes 3-5 times higher than an average office employee in Ukraine. 

Our investigation has shown that a lot of local Tech Education Institutions do not provide their students with the high-quality programs that would satisfy the modern standards of the tech talent. Most of young applicants succeed with their first IT job only because of their self-motivation and perseverance, not because of the IT courses. When we first got in touch with the Qwasar team, we understood that their methods of education might be what our local market needs. That is why we decided to start “Tech Mission” in Ukraine.

What are some of the advantages that you see in hands-on learning compared to traditional knowledge transfer?

Only when having practical tasks and projects a student realizes what they will be doing on their jobs during the next several years. With the good basis of practical skills, such specialists will easily adapt to their first project and will have less stress. Another advantage of such method is that despite the lack of commercial working experience, these candidates will have higher salaries at the start only because of their portfolio. Moreover, their monthly wages and the career will also grow faster.

It is really sad that our state universities usually don’t have modern software engineering learning tracks except for theory classes. Most of them are not teaching modern technologies and programming languages / frameworks. Therefore, young specialists usually have only one way out - to go to private IT schools. And they have to choose them wisely.

What are employers looking for in candidates in Kyiv?

During the last year, there was a huge offset to the remote work, so working ‘on-site’ has become more an option rather than a must. As said above, different companies mostly have different approaches to their recruitment standards, but all of them have one common thing. No one wants to hire a candidate who doesn’t have real-life experience for the current position since it is a big risk. If a candidate already has a portfolio or proven track of projects, then we can continue our discussion. Otherwise, the candidate can be easily lost in the tons of other CV’s and their chances are really low. 

Of course, it is still important to have the willingness to learn new things and evolve your skills, be agile in terms of collaboration and have a good level of English and soft-skills.

How can people apply to the program?

Diana: We have a website https://techmission.pro, anyone who is interested can apply and leave their contacts. Our managers will contact all applicants. I am also running free webinars for people who want to become Software or QA/QC Engineers on a monthly basis where they can get a lot of useful information and ask questions.

As part of a short blog series, we're interviewing each of our advisors here at Qwasar. Meet Cecile Thirion, founder of Thirion Advisors, LLC. Cecile has extensive experience in sales and marketing. She provides immeasurable support to our team.