Diversity in tech

According to official EU statistics, Sweden will be lacking almost 60,000 people with IT competence by 2020. Eight out of ten who work in the field are men and nine out of ten are born in Sweden. Only one fifth of those who work in the categories of programming and system development are women. It seems that whatever we are doing to attract new groups to the IT industry is just not working. This is not good.

Diversity is not only good for the industry — in the long run it is absolutely necessary if we want to be able to deliver good services, develop meaningful products and work in international projects.

Diversity increases creativity and innovation. In information and communication technology (ICT), a creative and knowledge-intensive branch, the conditions are right to attract and take advantage of different perspectives and knowledge. With a balanced mix of ages, genders and ethnicities among employees, knowledge-oriented organisations can create dynamic business culture which leads to better quality in the services they provide and the products they develop.

It’s really quite simple: Even if it feels more comfortable to surround yourself with copies of your self, it is much smarter to learn from others’ experience and use the synergies that occur when different people are mixed together.

Within our own organisation we have the privilege of working with course participants with very diverse backgrounds. Our cohorts mix participants with different ages, genders and ethnicities. We have participants who have years of professional work experience, as well as participants who have just graduated high school, and men and women who have tried many different jobs. Our coaches other staff members also represent different backgrounds and cultures. We have a Swedish-Polish tough talking Jack-of-all-trades as a founder, a Cameroonian-South African engineer wizard, a Swedish-Chilean feel-good guy, a Kenyan smooth-talker/programmer, two Swedish and Swedish-Finnish vagabond/developers and an American former-biologist-turned-start-up/programmer guy in our group. In short, Craft Academy has a wonderful mix of different individuals.

We have seen that precisely because our groups are so mixed, the participants enjoy it and thrive. It is not completely unproblematic. There is friction sometimes, and collaboration does not always go smoothly, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages — by far.

We want to contribute to more women entering the ITC industry, where they are extremely underrepresented. We believe that it is beneficial for the industry as a whole to have more even gender distribution.

We are happy to note that the percentage of women participants in our bootcamps is almost 40%. It is something we have worked hard to achieve but also something we are not satisfied with. We aim higher.

As part of our strategy to be active in developing a sustainable society, we have also been involved in projects that help newly arrived immigrants to establish themselves in the the Swedish job market. We have, for example, had two students with refugee status who were given a place in our bootcamp with a full scholarship. We’ve also been part of various open source projects helping to build technical solutions for better integration of refugees.

We want to and can do more. For the last 3 bootcamp cohorts we’ve had sponsored spots for participants who otherwise cannot participate in this type of training. We’ve been fortunate to meet and work with awesome learners and contribute to their success.

Diversity in in the tech industry means good business. We welcome any form of partnership that can help us achieve better equality and diversity. If you represent an organisation, school or company and know someone who might want to enter our industry and whose participation can help increase diversity in the industry, please contact me so that we can have a discussion. Perhaps together we can make a difference.