Code Like Her, a fellowship by Code Rush
On the 21st of June 2020, we at Code Rush Nepal initiated our pilot program, a web development fellowship we like to call ‘Code Like Her’. Here, I want to give you a glimpse of the program and an insider look into our company, possibly answering a few questions along the way.
What?
‘Code Like Her’ is a three months long training program for girl students or recent graduates wanting to pursue a career in full-stack JavaScript development. As with any other program from Code Rush, the end goal of this program is to equip our participants with cutting-edge technical skills that are in demand from the software industry all over Nepal. Along with technical competence in advanced web/cloud-based software development, we also provide participants with leadership & management skills and familiarize them with the software industry culture in Kathmandu.
The program has a competitive selection process and is completely free of cost. In the first batch of the program, we have 16 accepted participants.
Why?
If I were to describe our company to you in a sentence, I would say ‘we at Code Rush want to bridge the gap between academia and the software industry in Nepal by providing self-sustaining training programs to girls’. This is our mission, we not only want to increase the female participation in the industry, but we also want to see them thrive. To this end, we have conducted events and programs in the past, but ‘Code Like Her’ is the first of its kind and we believe that it will be the most impactful action we will have taken as a company.
The Gap and the Demand
The global software industry runs in a ‘deficit’, there is always more demand than what is available. Nepal is no exception, companies have a hard time finding a ‘right’ person to hire. Although there are 2000+ IT and computer engineering students graduating each year, they are not taught the skills the industry is looking for. This leads to a huge investment from companies looking for manpower, to find people and make them skilled.
We want to put the graduates of our fellowship in a position of unfair advantage, by equipping them with hands-on knowledge and skills to make them a better fit in the eyes of a hiring manager in any company. Keeping this in mind, our program offers modules like UI/UX basics, NodeJs, ReactJs, Redux, Quality assurance, and Project Management basics.
The Selection
We announced the fellowship at the beginning of 2020 with a lengthy application form consisting of questions on personal information, educational background, areas of interest, motives, and expectations of the applicant. We got an overwhelming response of more than 100 applicants who were students, professionals, and graduates.
From the submissions, enthusiastic candidates with relevant educational background were chosen for a written exam focused on basic programming knowledge and problem-solving skills. Applicants unfamiliar with any programming language could simply write an algorithm or pseudocode to solve a problem. The exams were conducted for 3 days.
After reviewing the answers from the exam, 30 of them were chosen and interviewed. Everyone was unique, some had gotten training before but were not satisfied, some wanted to pursue a career in programming but things didn’t work out, some were beginners still in college. Finally, after the interview 16 of them made it to the program.
Only girls?
In short, Yes.
Like me, if you were from an engineering college you would know that girls are only about 10% of the students. This is true not only for engineering but for any given technical field, which lands people with high-income jobs. Even though the number of girls pursuing these fields in Nepal is increasing year by year, the retention rate is still low due to challenges like pressure to start a family, sacrifice career, and a lower average age of marriage than men. The only way to disrupt and change these facts is to provide women with a head start early on.
The challenges
- Finding a suitable trainer: we were looking for someone with industry experience. It would be a period of 3 months and many selections, rejections, discussions, and frustrations before we came across a highly diverse, skilled, and motivated team from reputed companies in Nepal.
- The length of the program: Although the length of the program itself is no challenge, convincing people to commit to this length apparently is. ‘Code Like Her’ begins at 8 AM with 5-hour sessions each day.
- The Elephant in the room: Our team had planned for months in advance to kickstart the program in March but due to COVID and its threats, like the rest of the world, we made a transition to an online version instead of in-person training. This meant changing the structure of the program and shortening its length by half from 6 months to 3.
We recently completed the first anniversary of the establishment of Code Rush. I want to take a moment to thank our partners at ‘Kina’, who made it possible for this program to be free for participants.
Looking forward to a glorious year ahead.
-Astha
