Get with the Programmers

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“We try to instil a workplace mindset from the beginning, to better prepare students for the real world of work,” said Cassidy.

Any entrepreneur will tell you that the secret of a successful start-up is spotting a gap in a market and filling it. This usually involves solving a problem that prospective customers have been struggling with. For Anthony Quigley, it’s been around education, focusing on increasingly in-demand professional skills that are poorly served by more traditional training. First he did it with the Digital Marketing Institute, empowering marketing professionals with new skills for the social media era. Now, he’s tackled programming.

In 2015, he launched the Code Institute, a bootcamp for coders that sets out to address widely recognised skills shortages, hampering the growth of technology companies. With so many multinationals located in Ireland and a healthy indigenous sector, there was no shortage of local demand but Quigley had an eye on a much bigger market that he could serve with ‘one-to-many’ online courses.

Jim Cassidy, chief executive, takes up the story.

“By 2020, there are expected to be 800,000 vacant ICT roles across Europe and over a million in the US. So it became clear to Anthony that the traditional methodology being used for teaching in universities isn’t fit for purpose”

Founders of the Code Institute are not criticising what third-level technical courses teach; they’re just setting out to do something different. A computer science degree that takes four years to complete will not provide the throughput of skills the tech industry currently needs, according to Cassidy, and the sheer pace of technological change means that a lot of what students learn may be out of date by the time they graduate.

With 48-week full-time courses and 4-month part-time, the goal is to get jobready developers into the market faster and arm them with the skills that companies urgently need. The institute has been built from the ground up to be more agile than traditional colleges and will put on courses to meet spikes in demand. Its Industry Advisory Council, made up of corporates like Accenture and Morgan McKinley, recruits graduates from the institute and provides a useful barometer of the skills in demand. “We continually update, amend and change our courses based on their feedback, which helps us make sure courses are absolutely relevant,” said Cassidy.

Programme director Brian O’Grady is keen to stress that it’s not the aim or ambition of the institute to compete with a full degree. He describes the courses as “narrow scope, deep learning,” as opposed to universities that tend to be “broad scope, shallow on topics”. The big difference is that each course is hugely condensed. “When I did my postgraduate studies, I would have done around 49 hours of coding in a year. We’re doing 600 hours. It’s a very immersive experience as opposed to something that’s spread out over four years.”

The other big difference is that course participants are treated more like employees than students and given projects and practical assignments on a daily basis. “We try to instil a workplace mindset from the beginning, to better prepare students for the real world of work,” said Cassidy. “That’s why it’s project rather than exam-based. When a student is being interviewed for a job, they can show work that they’ve actually done.”

For any courses to be credible, they need to be accredited and internationally recognised. The institute’s diplomas conform to the requirements of the European educational framework and have been recognised by Edinburgh Napier University. Having identified the market and ticked the educational boxes, the focus has turned to growing the business.

In 2016, the institute raised €500,000 syndicated investment from Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland, which has been used to fuel overseas expansion. The biggest differentiator from bricks-and-mortar colleges is that 90% of its courses are taught online, which is fundamental to the start-up’s plans to grow internationally.

A number of global partnerships have been established in the UK, US and Saudi Arabia to advance overseas expansion, with more to come in Canada and Australia. “We have identified learning partners in each of these jurisdictions that have the expertise and skill sets to sell and support ICT-based courses,” explained Cassidy. “We have a 600-hour online course, so we need companies with a certain type of support capability.”

Course content is a combination of video and printed materials with interactive elements. The chat and collaboration app Slack is also part of the online set-up. “We try to recreate the social aspect of being in a classroom, which is a very important aspect of learning. Students can interact with each other as well as a dedicated teams of mentors,” said O’Grady. “It’s like having a professional developer sitting at the desk next to you.”

Two courses are currently running, a Full Stack Diploma that teaches the main programming languages (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and a Diploma in Tech Fundamentals. The first appeals to first-timers with no tech experience as well as people with some programming under their belt.

“I’d say 70% of people who take it have no software development background, and they’re looking to find a new career, but we also have a good cohort of people who have been exposed to some level of software development and are now looking to upskill”

The age range is typically 24–35, and, just like traditional computer courses, it’s still male dominated.

The second course is aimed at C-level managers as well as business owners and entrepreneurs who would benefit from a better understanding of code and programming. “Every business is now a technology business,” said Cassidy. “Take the course and you’ll see what’s required to get a business off the ground faster.”

Enterprise Ireland companies with Global Ambition

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Attendees at Enterprise Ireland‘s International Markets Week heard from established Irish companies successfully selling globally and had the opportunity for meetings with Market Advisors, available to provide expertise on exporting to new markets.

If you are attending IMW please consider the following:

  • In which markets are you successful and how have you achieved this success?
  • What is your business/value proposition?
  • Why have you decided to target this new market?
  • What market validation have you carried out and what evidence do you have for a demand for your product / service?

Contact the International Markets team at International Markets Week for further information.

Like the Rubik’s Cube, Hungary is Worth a Twist for Irish Businesses

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The designer of the Rubik’s Cube said “we turn the cube, and it in turn twists us”. In other words, to solve the puzzle you must look for other perspectives.

Hungarian professor Erno Rubik’s aphorism is apt for his home country today. Unorthodox politics and the controversial treatment of migrants has hurt its reputation, while the international business community has criticised Hungary for bringing its finances into check with the help of taxes on mostly foreign-owned banks and large companies.

However, much like the Rubik’s Cube, looking at Hungary from a variety of angles may lead to a different perspective.

For instance, it ranks in the top quartile of the Human Development Index and is the ninth most complex economy in the world – six places above Ireland. It exited the EU’s Excessive Deficit Procedure in 2013 and has defied predictions with growth projected at an average 2.5pc out to 2020. Imminent income tax cuts and a relaxation of a bank levy are expected to boost what has been described as a ‘creditless’ recovery.

It is a country of great artistic, cultural and sporting tradition. Hungarians won gold medals at every summer Olympics except Antwerp 1920 and Los Angeles 1984, when they did not compete. It was also the first country to host a Formula One Grand Prix from behind the Iron Curtain in 1986.

It counts composers such as Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Franz Liszt among its native sons and is also a pioneer of cinema, providing Hollywood with Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount, and Wilhelm Fuchs, who founded Fox Studios.

Hungary also boasts a strong scientific tradition, with scientists of Hungarian birth or origin receiving the Nobel Prize on more than 20 occasions. The OECD ranks Hungary 16th in the world in science education.

Indeed technical skills, allied to moderate wages and a location on the edge of European supply chains, led to investment in the early 1990s. Today, inward FDI amounts to 78pc of GDP, the highest in the region.

Hungary has been particularly successful in attracting FDI in the automotive and electronics sectors (often intertwined). As a result, participation in global value chains is among the highest in the OECD.

Large investors include Audi, Suzuki, GM and Mercedes plus more than 700 suppliers. Bosch, Alpin, Samsung, Honeywell and Rosenberger are among the big electronics players – and many are scaling up. This should interest Irish suppliers with sectoral references or offering added value for production or services.

There is also opportunity in Hungary’s national development plan (2014-2020), with €6bn allocated for health, infrastructure, environmental protection and tourism – which is predicted to increase 4.2pc this year, to a total of just over 12m visitors. Similar growth is expected until 2020, boosting tourism-related expenditure and hotel industry value.

BMI Research expects growth in the medical devices market of more than 6.3pc in 2016 and with the country reliant on imports to meet demand, producers and developers of time- and cost-saving healthcare solutions should take note.

Opportunities for Irish companies

Irish firms are already active here. Architectural practice O’Donnell+Tuomey designed the redevelopment of Budapest’s Central European University in time for this year’s 25th anniversary and CRH opened its new business services centre in the capital, providing administration for operations in Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

Outside Budapest, McHale Hungaria produces hay bailers in Szolnok; Kingspan manufactures construction industry components in Ujhartyan; and in Torokbalint, Kerry Group produces food ingredients.

So despite its reputational issues, Irish businesses should look again and take note of possibilities in Hungary, perhaps with the aid of an invention of a former Budapest newspaper editor called Laszlo Biro.

Ladislav Muller is Enterprise Ireland director for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria and is based in Prague

This article was originally published in the Sunday Independent

Talking The Customer’s Language

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Over half of Europeans (54 per cent) can hold a conversation in at least one additional language, 25 per cent speak at least two additional languages and 10% at least three. Irish business people are becoming more fluent, but we have to make this push more efficient, and become – like the Dutch, whose merchant culture has long made them multilingual – fluent in the languages of others.

At the heart of our complacency is a misconception that globalisation means that we can all get by speaking English, and that as native speakers, we’re alright. Another misconception is that we should speak our customers’ languages simply to be understood in case their English is not great. But really the reason the language will get you ahead is because you can research the market better, understand who your local and international competitors are (and position yourself accordingly) and be more aware of the cultural nuances in conducting business in that country.

The good news is that learning and practising languages has never been easier. The universities have intensive courses – for example, UCD’s Applied Language Centre. The specialist Sandford Language Institute in Milltown Park, Dublin, offers in-company courses, as well as courses in languages in demand, plus many courses in languages “subject to demand”. And there are familiar courses in individual languages from associations like Alliance Française, the GoetheInstitut, and Istituto Di Cultura.

The Berlin-based Abroadwith arranges immersion stays and courses where individuals or groups can learn and improve a language by staying with native speakers and going to classes in the country where the language is spoken; it has just launched a specialist business course option.

For the daily, constant, non-stop practice that everyone needs to become first at ease in speaking and understanding, and then gradually fluent, it is not always easy to get to centralised courses. But a host of online resources are available now that were undreamed-of even twenty years ago.

Comprehension: watch films in your target language – first with English subtitles, then with subtitles in the language. You can often buy old DVDs with “subtitles for the deaf” for as little as a few cents on the localised versions of Amazon. Some TV subscriptions, like Netflix, come with own-language subtitles which you can turn on through the settings. On YouTube, there are TED talks in many languages with closed-caption subtitles in the language of the speaker.

Grammar: Duolingo – a game-like app that drills you daily in your chosen language – is played by over 100 million people learning European languages, Hebrew, Russian, Vietnamese, etc. It brings you to a notional 62 per cent fluency level, which means you have a solid basic vocabulary and can use the main grammatical structures. It’s wildly addictive: many people start with one language and extend into learning several more.

Speaking: The Mixxer is a language exchange website that puts people in contact to swap languages. English is in high demand, luckily for us. You put up a brief ‘profile’ of yourself, with only as much information as you want to share, and offer to swap languages with native speakers of the language you are learning. When you are contacted, or you contact others, you talk to native speakers of your target language on Skype – typically half an hour in English and half an hour in their native language. (I talked to a French civil servant, who was due to be moved to the US; she was speaking to 10 people a week.)

Reading and local knowledge: international newspapers’ websites are updated at speed, and titles like Le Nouvel Observateur, Bild, Kommersant, and so on, are great vocabulary-builders. International TV is easy to watch online and will keep you au fait with the politics and business news of your target market.

Technical help: online dictionaries include the contextual, audio-enhanced, eight-language reverso.net – contextual meaning that you can enter a phrase and usually find an example of the phrase used in context, with audio.

TuneIn Radio: streams radio and podcasts from all over the world, with ‘slow news’ programmes in many languages.

One-to-one classes without leaving the office: most of the above are free. If you want dedicated professional teachers, italki, again using Skype, is an aggregate site on which native-speaking language teachers offer their services and charge by the hour. The advantage of this is that you can often find a teacher with specialist vocabulary relating to your business. Babbel has drills and comprehension exercises – good teaching made digital.

Cultural insight: it is now very affordable to buy used books in many language on aggregation sites such as Alibris and AbeBooks: for basic vocabulary (and the slang that you may not wish to use but you need to understand), comic books, children’s books, thrillers, cookery books, and for your own business need technical manuals, political works, business books in the language of your market. (A tip: you will learn faster if you do not look up the words you do not know as you go along, but instead underline in pencil any unfamiliar word, and when you finish the book go back and read it again – this time you will know most words by context.)

For when you are travelling: podcasts like the Irish learnfrenchbypodcast.com give you daily lessons – often free for the basic podcast, but with PDFs of the lessons with further help available for a small payment. It will make such a difference when you walk into your supplier’s or into that conference and greet people and speak in their own language – and even before you are fluent, it will break down barriers and warm the relationship. There is no better negotiating tool than a mother language.