IT LAUNCH BOX

Nowadays, there is a huge gap between companies’ need of skilled digital technology experts and the capacity of the labor market to respond to these needs. It may seem like a paradox if we take a look at the high rates of unemployment especially among young people. In order to identify what is the source of this gap, we have made consultations with stakeholders from the partner countries and we discovered that employers are looking for employees with entrepreneurial skills who can easily adapt to the digital trends which impact the companies. On the other hand, we noticed that in order to attract youth to the IT sector we need to provide them a strong, but yet flexible instruments of learning that respond to their particularities as generation. Besides strengthening the cooperation between educational, nonprofit, public and business sector through designing a learning platform that ensures access to quality courses in the IT and entrepreneurship sector, we also noticed that if we want the learning process to be efficient, we will have to provide to our participants mentorship and support from people with experience in the two mentioned above areas.
Thus, the main goal of our project was to equip young people with employability skills and knowledge and increase the number of IT young entrepreneurs who can contribute to entrepreneurship development and create new job places.

We managed to do that through designing and creating an open innovative accelerated educational program for IT and entrepreneurship where the subscribers could access three modules on IT topics and one on entrepreneurship, and another platform that gathered together experienced mentors who offered support to the young people in order to better assimilate the information.

The specific objectives that we established and also reached are:

O1. To develop open innovative accelerating program (BootCamp) that will equip young people with skills and knowledge in areas: software development and entrepreneurship;
O2. To train 300 young people for specific IT and entrepreneurship skills;
O3. To create online mentorship platform for young people who will need support in further development of their business ideas in the IT sector or create carrier in IT industry;
O4. To establish 40 successful mentorship relations between young people and mentors in IT industry.Target group was composed of unemployed young people, potential entrepreneurs and young professionals.
We had 620 young people participating in BootCamp which means we managed to double the number of participants established in the objectives.

As a sustainability instrument, we will continue to keep both platforms open in order to reach the sustainable indicators which we established at the beginning, meaning to have at least 30 participants who will open business and 100 who will become employed in IT industry, and for those who want to continue their learning and mentorship platform and we will stay in touch with the participants to offer them support in starting their own businesses or find a job in IT industry.
Also, through the activities of the project we managed to increase the organizational capacity of all the partners involved to carry out learning and mentorship processes who can help their beneficiaries have a better insertion to the labor market.