Meet Code Camp Leipzig's crop of bright students

Code Camp Leipzig is preparing to kick off its first classes on Monday, 23 September. The new tech academy, committed to teaching bright job-seekers to code in three months, has taken on 13 pupils from about six nationalities for its inaugural run.

You can meet the students, and hear from the companies hiring some of them, in Code Camp Leipzig’s launch party, also on Monday.

Pending the course’s successful completion, four bright hand-picked candidates will walk away with positions at one of the sponsoring companies: PRISMA and e-dox. With the help of recruiting experts get a MINT, Code Camp Leipzig will actively look for companies that may be interested in hiring the other students, says co-founder Taylor Harvey.

The goal is to qualify them to become junior software developers by the end of the course. The diversity in their professional paths – neuroscience PhD holder, startup project manager, social worker, business developer, salesperson, graphic designer, mechanical engineer, etc. – shows that companies are not necessarily just interested in hiring people with a tech background for a developer job if they are willing to learn the ropes. In the rigorous application process involving several steps, the Code Camp Leipzig team also had to take the sponsoring companies’ opinions into account, and hence students’ employability.

Harvey affirms:

What these students all have in common is caring about something greater than themselves. They all want to make something better. The vast majority of them found themselves interested in technology and brought themselves closer to it, even though they didn’t have a degree in it. None of them applied for Code Camp just because they wanted to get a job.

Of the incoming students, seven – or 54 percent – are women. Women also represent three of the four bright candidates already identified for jobs post-Code Camp.

Women have been notoriously underrepresented in tech and entrepreneurship, and the academy wants to contribute to transforming this scenario. It also wants to play a role in changing the culture of education in general.

Instead of focusing on cookie-cutter models and degrees, Harvey says Code Camp Leipzig is turning to an individual’s needs for practical training to land a job in tech. After all, he adds, “they say that every company is a tech company. There’s no service that people can offer anymore that’s not based on technology in some way. So that’s where the jobs are.”

The folks behind Code Camp Leipzig are invested in creating an environment where generous, open-minded people with diverse perspectives, approaches and backgrounds – and with a passion for learning, sharing and exchanging skills and ideas – can feel at home and free to develop their full potential. This ties into the concept of an “open tech community,” which is a central theme of their launch party on Monday.

The party will provide pizza, beer and inspiring talks and conversations. LeipGlo will also be present and tell the story of building up a hyperlocal international community towards the goal to #BeABiggerDot in the tough East German market.