While sitting in my garden, having tea with friends from FAST Lahore, some of whom are working at Google, Meta, Stanford and UC Berkley, perspectives on the current social and economic circumstances were being put forth. The undeniable effect of inflation, income disparity, and unemployment on the youth was being discussed.
Agreed, there can be no immediate or even mid-term reversible measures for this. But what can be done to curtail the intensity, as step one, and to have the basic block in place for the economy to stabilise or back on?
When you have those on the table who have played a pivotal role in developing platforms and software that the world now relies upon for our daily affairs, you know you are bound to have solutions that are rooted in logic, methodology and scalability.
The underlying key word, not to any surprise, was TECH.
It is in one universal language – CODING.
If we set the path for our youth – fresh tech graduates and young IT professionals, and train them to code exceptionally well with the right human skills, we have a dynamic, unstoppable force ready for the tech sector already growing against all odds.
I have always been an ardent proponent of the 'resources and capabilities' mix to bring about an impact. The answer to filling Pakistan’s tech human resource gap, a persistently faced challenge by our IT industry, lies in building the capability first; resources would follow.
This was the time when my experience of being in the skill-development and training space over the past few years came in handy. By now, my team and I had cracked the nut of ‘genuine’ learning & skill enhancement – practical, hands-on and real-time application of the concepts taught.
We had figured it out that if we are to make Pakistan the next big tech hub of the world, we need to first make the ‘right’ people – people with the right ‘technical’ skills, people with the right ‘interpersonal’ skills, people who are ‘ready-to-deliver’ as soon as they join the workforce. And then connect the two ends of the spectrum by placing the right people with the right skills at the right job.
The end goal was clear: creating well-rounded, holistic programmers for our tech industry.
With this clarity in mind, Sarfraz Raza (a dear friend of mine from university and by far one of the best tech minds I have ever come across) and I got together. I distinctly remember the joy I felt in knowing how aligned we were in making this happen and in feeling the passion we shared.
That is when we came up with the rigorou 10-week long bootcamp - Cracking the Coding Interview, with a laser sharp focus on logic building, problem solving strategies, smart algorithm building, efficient and optimized coding practices. The underlying objective was one: making a dynamic mix of Mathematics and Computer Science that makes coding a fun thing to learn for the young tech minds. The buzzing energy of students in the classes, the highly engaging post-class help-sessions, the scrupulous nature of the assignments and the newly found ability to dream big by the sprouting tech minds, were a living proof of that.
Where our graduates are being well-received by leading IT companies and getting mentorship from top professionals of the industry, in the process another pressing demand of the tech sector was recognised – the need to upskill existing early stage professionals in Full Stack Development.
Designed in collaboration with Sarfraz Raza, our Full Stack Ninja Bootcamp is a 12-weeks training program especially designed for professionals falling within 0-5 years of experience bracket. In addition to honing multiple tech stacks that includes 4 programming languages, 4 frameworks, databases, and 7 front-end and back-end tools, strengthening logic building lies at its core.
While developing cutting-edge programming skills is the backbone of the bootcamp, due consideration has been given to ‘professional development’ - the pressing need for which we discovered in the past year during our frequent interactions with the leaders of the tech industry and training their teams. This entails nurturing their human skills such as communication, client handling and stakeholder management.
Our Full Stack Ninja Bootcamp is cut-out for fresh and young professionals to become the best at what they do: Code.
The times that we are in right now, investing in the capabilities of our tech human resource is the need of the hour. I invite all leaders of the IT industry to join us on our journey of developing and giving Pakistan the tech human capital it needs to become a force to reckon with.