CodersTrust focuses on helping students improve their IT and coding skills for outsourcing and the online freelance market
According to a report by McKinsey, freelance portals will create more than 150 million jobs globally by 2025.
And a new education startup called CodersTrust is aiming to teach students new IT and coding skills in order to land those freelance and outsourcing jobs–a goal that CodersTrust believes will be critical for future economies.
For example, Elance, one of the major online freelance job portals, has a whopping 54 percent of its listed jobs in the IT & Programming category, with those jobs going for over $2 billion dollars total.
By keeping an eye on the industry and identifying these trends in outsourcing and freelance jobs, CodersTrust says it has created a “unique education pathway” to help students obtain these often higher paying jobs.
Enrolling in the CodersTrust program, which the program explains provides both microfinance and e-learning courses, allows students to bypass the need for obtaining degrees from expensive traditional or 2-year institutions by directly upgrading their IT and web/mobile programming skills.
The company is seeking to train 100,000 students in the next three years.
(Next Page: Learn how exactly the CodersTrust program works)
Although the program is mainly suited to existing tech students and freelancers, graduates–even those without experience but who are interested in IT–are also welcome to enroll. However, the program requires a trial month, and promising coders must display appropriate skills to formally begin their pathway.
For students who are approved for courses, CodersTrust also provides microloans that are paid out monthly over the course of 12 months. Loans are divided between tuition costs and living expenses, so that students don’t have to worry about themselves or their families suffering economically while they take the time to study, says the Program. Once they begin working, students are required to repay the loans with approximately 50 percent of their salaries going back to the microfinance lending institution: 10 percent to CodersTrust to continue funding their programs, and 40 percent to the students themselves until their debts are repaid.
In terms of the academics, CodersTrust explains that the curriculum is a “highly personalized online learning program with content assembled by leading professionals in the field.” Courses teach coding through tutorials and videos, beginning with the basics of HTML and CSS, then moving to JavaScript and PHP, and further delving into Photoshop, design, and architecture principles by the end of the course.
For hands-on experience, students perform paid assignments from online freelance marketplaces, as well as interact with mentors one-on-one. Students talk with their mentors for hour-long chats twice a week, in addition to mentors frequently having open office hours, says CodersTrust.
“A major part of the outsourcing industry is built upon prior experience and trustworthiness, so the main benefit of CodersTrust comes in a student building up their portfolios respectably by linking all of their online profiles to CodersTrust,” emphasized the company. “As students continue through the program, their freelance profile becomes filled with reviews, worked hours, test scores, and a rundown of their clients. All of these factors combine to eventually entitle students to higher hourly wages on freelance portals.”
Already, CodersTrust has received industry support, thanks to backing by the Danish Government and the Princess of Bahrain, as well as a list of investors and experts including Morten Lund, Sir Richard Branson, and Mark Medish. The company has also partnered with Grameen, a social business initiative that was founded by Professor Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize-winning microfinance innovator.
For further information on CodersTrust, take a look at this slideshow overview from their pitch deck.
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