As the war for tech talent continues, companies are feeling the pressure to offer exorbitant salaries in an effort to win out against their competitors. It’s a candidate’s market, with degree-holding software engineers having their pick of employment.
In response, non-traditional education methods, like coding bootcamps, are gaining steam across Canada.
These up-skill programs, often completed remotely, directly equip students with the toolkits they need to get hired in tech.
Some, such as Discover Coding, look to deploy tech skills within a much younger demographic, and with a slightly different goal in mind.
The Canadian tech literacy platform isn’t about getting adults hired, but rather giving youth the “skills needed to be leaders in tomorrow’s digital world.”
The digitization of everything is well underway, with an increasing percentage of everyone’s lives—both personal and work—being online. Digital is now the default, according to Techcouver.
That’s why educators and parents Jennifer Lam and Johnny Huynh founded Discover Coding in 2017: to empower kids to create with technology, “instead of just consume it.”
The tech-forward education platform targets kids as young as five, as well as teenagers.
Programs can integrate directly into school curriculum and are designed with strategic educational methodologies in mind: hands-on activities, rewarding projects, and age-friendly lesson plans so kids of all ages can access essential skills.
Children build knowledge as they advanced through progressing coding curriculum, working on fun projects like building a video game, according to the organization’s website.
“We believe that education and fun go hand-in-hand,” the Edmonton-born organization states, whose name pays homage to discovery-based learning.
These fun and progressive programs can be completed online, in supporting schools—more than 50 so far—or at Discover Coding’s basecamp in Alberta.
Lam and Huynh believe that coding education can cultivate better literacy skills, higher self-confidence, more creative thinking, and improved problem solving within youth.
Which parent would not want to see that kind of development in their child?
Discover Coding also equip students with some of today’s most valued tech skills—software developers and engineers remain among the most in-demand positions in Canada.
