The IT Skills gap is a huge problem and, with 1 million unfilled digital jobs expected in Europe by 2020, unfortunately it’s only expected to get worse. Tied in with this is an industry struggling with diversity, and also the “coder stereotype” (which I’m sure we all know well). But why is that the case? Learning to code can be solitary, supportless, and frustrating.

There is a huge drop-out rate of online courses for coding, even though we need to maximise the number of people moving into the industry. Some would say “that’s just the way it is”… but can we change it? Can we use collaboration to improve things? I believe collaborative coding is the best way to learn to code, and will try and explore why this might help get more and different types of people into coding.

It’s also improving the practice of professional software teams too, and it turns out it may be a better way to interview coders – testing both their coding skills and soft skills! I will introduce the work we are doing to prove this, with our online platform, and our work in the community with charities such as Crisis.

About the Speakers

Chris Meah is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham in the School of Computer Science. He has also set up the School of Code, a start-up aiming to help more and different types of people into the tech industry, and improve the way we learn to code.

ESpark is short for Entrepreneurial Spark – it’s the world’s largest free business accelerator  http://www.entrepreneurial-spark.com/ . They take entrepreneurs and help them grow and scale their businesses.