31 Oct 2022

Top skills you need for your tech recruits

The following piece was written by CodeClan and originally appeared in FutureScot on 17th October 2022.


Most software developers need specific ‘hard skills’, otherwise known as technical skills. They include things like programming languages and software testing. But developers also need ‘soft’ or essential skills – the ones probably already acquired through past work experience.

Take a look at the top three soft and hard skills young people need to become an effective software programmer. This list is not exhaustive, but it makes an excellent starting point.

Soft skills for software development

1. Problem-solving or analytic skills

As a software developer, they will frequently face technical problems to resolve. They will often encounter bugs in code. They might also need to develop new software solutions.

People with strong problem-solving or analytic skills are well-suited to this line of work. Good developers can analyse and summarise a problem before considering several angles and finding a solution.

Analytical skills are not unique to people who work in STEM. Most professional roles require critical thinking and gauging the best way to respond to an obstacle.

2. Time management 

Software developers often need to meet tight deadlines. They also need to keep abreast of the latest technical developments in their area of expertise.

Balancing deliverables with self-teaching requires strong time management skills. Organising and prioritising tasks are important though often overlooked aspects of a developer’s role.

Time management is an essential skill. How often do your recruits need to exercise time management skills in their role?

3. Communication skills

Developers rarely work in isolation. Rather, they are part of a wider team tasked with delivering a set project. That team will usually need to collaborate with other groups.

This makes strong communication skills highly desirable in a software developer.

Knowing how to ask the right questions, bring up challenges, propose solutions and get along with teammates are integral to the development process.

If they have ever had to give a presentation, contribute to a meeting or participate in teamwork, then this is a way to see how they have exercised their communication skills. The question is, How strong is their communication and does it fit into your organisation?

Hard skills for software development

1. Programming languages

There are literally hundreds of programming languages, which can make learning how to code seem a little daunting.

The five most popular programming languages for developers are JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, and TypeScript.

But that does not mean your new recruit needs to know all there is to know about these languages to become a software developer. In reality, most developers know a handful of programming languages, and they are constantly updating their knowledge of how to use them.

The best way to start? Learn the basics of one programming language. This is how CodeClan supports our career changers and upskills our partner network. We have a whole range of courses to help you.

2. Software testing and debugging

It is one thing to write code; it is another thing entirely to make it work.

Testing software is another key part of a developer’s role. There are specialists whose role is to design test procedures – often, developers must learn how to apply them.

Testing often reveals bugs in software. Developers need to identify what is causing the bug – they can then begin to find a solution – often by asking other teammates or turning to online forums.

3. Data structure

Data structures are methods of organising data to make performing operations more efficient.

Just like programming languages, there are different types of data structures, including arrays, stacks and queues.  Getting to know different data structures and learning which to choose is a key technical skill for software developers.

Final thoughts

Just like any other profession, software development requires a range of soft and hard skills.

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07 Oct 2022

It’s time to stop making excuses. Getting more women in tech must underpin efforts to create an inclusive digital economy

The following piece was written by Polly Purvis OBE, a Trustee and Chair for Digital Xtra Fund as well as Deputy Chair at Converge Challenge. She is also a former CEO of ScotlandIS and Chair of CodeClan. It originally appeared in FutureScot on 7th October 2022.


When Apple CEO Tim Cook made a rare appearance in London last month, he had one simple and very powerful message to share: we need more women in tech, and there is no excuse for failing to achieve gender equality.

Everyone wants a more diverse workforce and equity of opportunity, but there are some very specific reasons for requiring more women to join the sector.

At the most basic level, it is a simple matter of understanding and respecting your customer base. At least 50 per cent of global consumers are women, so when new products are being developed it is essential that women are involved from the design stage right through the process.

I’ve seen some software teams that really have no clue about how women will interact with their systems, and it is easy to see how AI can go on to perpetrate unintentional bias if the data on which they act is incomplete or worse still incorporates stereotypes.

We also need more women starting businesses. That is true not just of tech but across the board. One of the issues is that women tend to be more risk averse, but we need to consider how to harness that. More encouragement would also be welcome. Women are often early adopters of products, whether they be new foods or new tech, so there is an opportunity to actively engage with women and support them as entrepreneurs.

Education is a key challenge. For years women have been underrepresented in STEM university courses and occupations. It is estimated that only about 19 per cent of computer science students are female, and it is the same picture for engineering and technology. Female students make up more than a third (37 per cent) of mathematical sciences students, which is a relative improvement but still not good enough. Apple itself only has about 35 per cent women in its workforce.

CodeClan, Scotland’s industry-led and only SQA-accredited digital skills academy, has made good progress in recruiting and training women but the split is still about 60/40 in favour of male students.

One problem is that girls and young women, particularly around the late primary school and early high school stage, are receiving the wrong messages as part of careers advice. This isn’t always via the school – it can also be from parents who view other occupations as more appealing, for example financial services and law – so we need to redouble our efforts to promote computing science and technology as attractive, well paid career options.

And, despite the best efforts of the Scottish Government, we don’t have enough computing teachers. Graduates can earn three or four times more by going straight into software development and engineering, so it is not difficult to see why teaching is being left behind. But it is vital that we boost numbers and make computing as accessible as possible if we are to address the gender gap.

Extracurricular opportunities must also be supported. Digital Xtra Fund is a brilliant scheme that provides grants to organisations delivering digital and tech activities to young people across Scotland, such as dressCode, a charity which delivers lunchtime clubs for girls aged 11-23, focused on games design, web development and cyber security. SmartSTEMs is another excellent third sector organisation inspiring young people aged 10-14, especially girls, by hosting and organising events in schools. Making computing fun and exciting is important if we are to successfully engage with girls and other underrepresented groups – so let’s see this continue and expand further, as part of the plans.

Sadly, we still don’t have enough senior women in tech in Scotland but having positive role models in place is definitely helping to drive change. And we need to ensure women are at the forefront in all areas of tech from usability to software engineering, sales to project management – not just the areas which have traditionally been dominated by females such as HR. On a positive note, there is early evidence that more women are coming through in data science, but greater representation must be across the board. If that means embracing an element of positive discrimination, so be it.

Change isn’t going to happen overnight. There are many positive initiatives underway in Scotland, but societal shifts take much longer than we think and need a great deal of reinforcement. The next 10 years are crucial and what we do now will determine our future success as an inclusive digital economy that recognises and creates opportunities for all.

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30 Mar 2022

CodeClan partners with Baillie Gifford to launch youth academy

The following article appeared on insider.co.uk on 25 March 2022.


Scotland’s national digital skills academy CodeClan has partnered with Baillie Gifford, who have also supported Digital Xtra Fund’s grant awards programme since 2018, to launch a new youth-focused programme. The CodeClan Youth Academy will be aimed at young people aged 17 and over, providing them with programming skills required in an industry environment.

The eight-week course will be based in Edinburgh and include a four-week coding bootcamp at CodeClan followed by a four-week paid internship at an industry partner. With 10 spaces available in the first cohort, the programme starts on 4 July. CodeClan reckons students completing the course will be able to carry out tasks equivalent to the role of a junior front-end developer.

The bootcamp section at CodeClan will include training in HTML and CSS, presentation skills, JavaScript, NodeJS, and introductions to user experience and Angular.

Yvonne Robertson, chief of information systems staff at Baillie Gifford, said: “We believe it’s crucial that we all play a part in developing our young workforce and addressing the current digital skills gap by providing insight into the range of career opportunities within the technology sector.

“As an industry and a business community, we can collectively share our vast experience and knowledge to help guide young people to positive outcomes beyond school, such as apprenticeships or further education in tech.”

Melinda Matthews-Clarkson, chief executive at CodeClan, said: “We have a broad tech landscape in Scotland, from agriculture to creative industries and space tech, but we don’t have enough people to meet the growing needs of our economy – it’s time to rally the younger generation to build the skills we need to make our world a better place.”

In February, CodeClan partnered with Tigers, the Glasgow-based apprenticeship education provider, to co-deliver an education and mentorship programme aimed at providing more young people in Glasgow with the skills and confidence as a step towards securing employment.

Applications close on 6 May.

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17 Jun 2017

Digital Xtra Fund Trustee Polly Purvis honoured with OBE

Polly Purvis, founding Trustee of the Digital Xtra Fund has been honoured with an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2017.

Polly who is CEO of technology trade body ScotlandIS and chair of digital skills academy CodeClan was recognised for her services to the Digital Economy in Scotland. In an interview with The Scotsman, Polly stated that she was both ‘delighted and surprised to receive the award.’

Everyone associated with the Digital Xtra Fund would like to extend their congratulations to Polly.

Picture: Lisa Ferguson/TSPL

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23 Mar 2017

Digital Xtra Fund shortlisted for Digital Tech Awards

Digital Xtra Fund has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Best Education Provider/Training Programme category, sponsored by Administrate, at this year’s ScotlandIS Digital Tech Awards.

The category recognises inspirational, practical and effective education and training solutions that identify and maximise the skills required for today’s business.

The Digital Xtra Fund was launched in May 2016 and has distributed £400,000 to organisations delivering extracurricular computing and digital activities to under 16s across Scotland.

Partners of the Digital Scotland Business Excellence Partnership have provided the funding to date.

So far 22 projects have been funded by Digital Xtra and are expected to reach 15,000 school pupils across every local authority area in Scotland in digital activities. Funded initiatives have included the training of over 140 librarians to deliver CodeClubs, the expansion of Apps for Good across Scotland through to the use of lighthouse design to introduce ‘little engineers’ to STEM concepts.

CodeClan and The Data Lab are recognised as the other finalists in this award category.

CodeClan, which operates in Edinburgh and Glasgow, is Scotland’s first dedicated software skills academy designed to teach graduates core coding skills over a 16 week period. Many of the students find employment at the end of the course. Data Lab enables new collaborations between industry, public sector and universities driven by common interests in the exploitation of data science. It provides resources and funding to kick-start projects, deliver skills and training, and help to develop the local ecosystem by building a cohesive data science community.

The awards, now in their seventh year, celebrate the talent and ideas abundant in Scotland’s world-class digital technologies industry. This year the awards received a huge number of entries from a diverse range of companies and organisations, reflecting the health of the sector. The judging panel included experts, champions and influencers from across the breadth of the nation’s digital technology industry and the public sector.

Polly Purvis CEO of ScotlandIS said: “We are a small country with outstanding capabilities reflected in the diversity, scale and sheer innovation of the companies on the shortlist. The continued success of the industry is reflected in the awards, which highlight the wealth of opportunities available to those considering a career in this vibrant sector. ”

The winners of the Digital Tech Awards will be revealed at a gala night at Glasgow’s Radisson Blu Hotel on Thursday 27th April 2017.

ScotlandIS Award Image by Guy Hinks

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02 Dec 2016

Skills Skills Skills

In the space of the past twenty four hours, the wires have been humming with news of EU Commission’s launch of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, Oracle’s donation of $1.4 billion to computer sciences and digital skills learning and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, unveiling a £7m Digital Talent Programme to arm young Londoners with the skills they need to access jobs in the capital’s thriving digital, technology and creative industries.

It may be a coincidence that these stories, much to the chagrin of the respective PRs, have broken at the same time or it might simply be that the subject of Digital Skills is now main stream news.

I’d err with the later and it’s not before time that we elevated tech stories from the business pages to the front sections of our on and off line media.

Every single economic indicator, global or local, has been screaming for over a decade, since the mass deployment of broadband and mobile access technologies, that the next industrial revolution will be in the cloud and that the jobs of the future will require computing skills and yet we have somehow managed to ignore the signs.

In 2006 the world’s top six most valuable public companies included General Electric, Citigroup, BP & Royal Dutch Shell. Today these business have been replaced with Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon & Facebook. Only ExxonMobil and Microsoft, another tech giant, are common to both lists ten years on, giving credence to the saying that ‘data is the new oil’.

During this same period, Europe has seen demand for workers with computer science and coding skills grow by four percent each year, year on year, and with no sign of abatement.

Back in June of this year, The UK Government’s Science and Technology Committee published a report which frankly made depressing if inevitable reading. The report warns that the UK will need 745,000 extra digitally skilled workers, across all sectors, by 2017. As this wasn’t challenging enough, the report sets out the size of the task in plugging this skills gap, by revealing that 12.6 million adults in the UK lack basic digital skills; 5.8 million people have never used the internet; only 35% of computer teachers in schools have a relevant degree and computing science teacher recruitment sees a 30% shortfall.

If we just focused on Scotland, the figures would be just as shocking. 1 million Scots don’t have internet access. 30 per cent of the Scottish population lack basic digital skills. The number of computing teachers has fallen from 802 to 598 over the past ten years and 17% of secondary schools have no computing specialist. According to projections by Deloitte, Scotland is set to lose £9bn in potential gains over the next 15 years if it doesn’t adopt a visionary digital action plan.

And there we have the crux of the problem. Education in its broadest sense.

We are currently guilty of failing our young people and we are denying them one of the greatest gifts that we can bestow: opportunity. We are anchoring them at the wrong end of the technology food chain and in doing so we are damaging the economic and social prospects of our nations.

It’s not just the formal education system that is failing our young people but the support provided by parents and carers to them as they develop and make life choices.

What is the likelihood of a parent who has never used the internet suggesting to their son or daughter that they consider a career in data analytics or cyber security? I’m not a betting man but I reckon the odds would be pretty high.

At least in Scotland the Education system appears to have woken from its slumber and is starting to make positive changes. There is a recognition that computing science and digital subjects are vital and are now being placed at the heart of the curriculum, more specialist teachers are being recruited and classrooms are being upgraded with latest technology. But, to use an oil analogy again, the education system is one big tanker and it’s going to take time to turn it around.

Changing the perceptions and attitudes of parents and carers towards computing and digital careers on the other hand will take even longer. This is one of the reasons why it is so important that the main media channels, both on and offline, continue to promote the digital world and the opportunities it offers as mainstream at every turn. Oh if there is anyone reading this with TV commissioning responsibilities, please can we have some children’s programmes on computing and technology and the odd Data Centre Network engineer or App Designer wouldn’t go amiss in a soap or two.

So is it all doom and gloom? Have we really created a booming sector and somehow overlooked the development of the talent pipeline to fuel its continued growth?

Well Yes, the facts can’t be disputed, but on the other hand, what is now encouraging and apparent is that we (‘we’ being Government, Education and Industry) have finally recognised that there is a real issue to be addressed and that the time for rhetoric and spin is over and we now need action.

Over the past two years and since the publication of the tech sector Skills Investment Plan by Skills Development Scotland, the country has witnessed some real progress and managed some positive gains.

Only this week Edinburgh based CodeClan, the Digital Skills Academy that delivers intensive programming courses and helps people to reskill and move into the tech sector, celebrated its first birthday by announcing expansion plans into Glasgow. During its inaugural year 166 students have started the course, 101 have completed, with 59 ‘inflight’, and 80% of those who have completed the course are now in relevant jobs. An impressive start.

The DigitalWorld Campaign launched last year is a national initiative that inspires and supports people to go into digital technology careers. Over the past twelve months, using a mix of online and face to face, it has reached thousands of young people and, importantly, their parents, promoting technology and the attractiveness of the sector at every opportunity.

We are also beginning to truly harness and appreciate the power of ‘in work learning’ as we see more and more young people, supported by industry, seek internships and apprenticeships to help them ‘earn whilst they learn’ whilst gaining valuable skills and experience , for example through the highly successful e-placement Scotland programme.

And finally, we have at last woken up to the fact that we need to capture the hearts and minds of our young people long before they are in a position to select their subject choices at S3.

Today’s children are the first generation for whom technology is omnipresent -affecting every element of their lives from the moment they were born. Computational thinking as a skill has never been more needed and we’re seeing recognition of this reflected in preschool and primary services providing children with educational tools to encourage the development of computer and coding skills.

Another hugely positive development has been the acceptance of the importance of extracurricular activities to complement, in some cases filling a void, formal school activity.

The Digital Xtra Fund was created in May this year by the Scottish Government, who contributed £400,000 to fund extracurricular computing science and digital activities for under 16s across Scotland.

In its first year the Fund has supported a wide range of innovative projects that will directly reach over 15,000 young people across the country. Funded projects have included the training of public library employees to deliver Code Clubs to young people across 28 of the 32 Local Authority Library Services and the extension of the Apps for Good programme across Scotland. Apps for Good will now engage 2,500 young people and provide them with the opportunity to design, build, market and launch apps to solve problems in their communities.

It has to be recognised that what we are trying to achieve here is as much a cultural shift as it is simply a skills rebalance but we have at least started the journey. And it is a journey.

And if we are to continue on an upward path then it is essential that we (Government, Education, Industry) don’t sit back and wait for others to solve the problems. We all have the same goal and we will achieve it if we pool resources and work together.

Two of the initiatives mentioned – CodeClan and DigitalXtra Fund – need industry buy in if they are to succeed and continue to grow. CodeClan requires employer partners and DigitalXtra requires funds to continue to support innovative projects that can make a real difference to young Scot’s lives.

If you want to help the DigitalXtra Fund please CONTACT US NOW.

 

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