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We recently celebrated the training of our 120th Software Development apprentice, and our 600th coding course graduate! With the support of the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, our staff, students, graduates and employers came together to recognise the impact that Code Nation's Software Development training has made to the Manchester tech scene. If you didn't know already, we're head-quartered in Manchester’s city centre, providing Software Development Apprenticeships and private training courses. We're creating a viable solution to the digital skills gap; business-ready digital talent. Having harnessed funding from the Apprenticeship Levy, we can provide training in Software Development free of charge and have created great coding careers for our graduates - 89% of whom had no prior experience in the field. Forget what you heard about Apprenticeships... Our 15-month programme has revolutionised the way ‘traditional’ apprenticeships are delivered, ensuring each student is both technically sound and commercially savvy. That means our grads are hitting the ground running and earning great salaries from day one. And it’s our ‘business-led’ curriculum that makes this happen. The skills gap across Greater Manchester and beyond is a serious issue that businesses are facing. They need a quick and genuine solution when it comes to finding talent, and it needs to be the ‘right’ people - the ones who can make an impact from day 1 and understand why their role is so significant in the digital revolution. That’s why we work with businesses to build what we teach. We think it goes without saying that learning great technical skills is important. Students are surrounded by professional teachers and technical experts when they study with us, and they learn the modern tech stacks that employers are using. It’s a next-generation technical education. But they also pick up the skills that make them ‘work-ready’ - working with Kanban boards and time sheets, using Trello and giving lightning talks, delivering commercial projects and drinking loads of coffee… The course includes yoga and mindfulness training, quiz nights and chess competitions, too. It’s really important that our students have an opportunity to get their head out of the code. It means they can focus on something different and take on the problem they’re solving with a fresh perspective - and a happy coder makes a great coder. We owe our success entirely to the people who have experienced what we do - the apprentices, the graduates and the employers are the people that make it happen. We recently celebrated the training of our 120th Apprentice and the graduation of our 600th student, and the Mayor of Greater Manchester showed his support in their achievements and the contribution they have made to the local tech scene. We think the numbers speak volumes when it comes to the opportunities we're creating, with over 90% of our self-funded students in employment across the sector, in addition to our successes in the Apprenticeship space. Just a year ago ‘Code Nation’ existed in a single office in central Manchester - it’s where our staff were based, as well as our students, and back then we were just a coding school. We hadn’t ventured into training apprentices at that time. Fast forward 12 months, the demand for digital skills has enabled us to inhabit a 5000 square foot space that gives us the capacity to train 600 apprentices a year, in Greater Manchester alone. We’ve expanded into Trafford, Chester and most recently Cambridge, and we’re delighted to have the support of our local Mayor in what we’re doing. We’ve seen an almost exponential demand for the work-ready talent that we create and we’re proud to be contributing to making Greater Manchester “the smartest city” as Andy Burnham hopes it will become. It was an absolute pleasure to welcome Mr Burnham to our Manchester Campus last week - a real honour for everyone at Code Nation. We even live streamed his visit to our other campuses so they could be part of such a memorable day. Following his visit to our Manchester HQ, the Mayor, Andy Burnham, commented, “The single biggest thing that gets said to me as I speak to tech companies around the world is: can we give them the talent if they invest here? Do we have the talent pipeline? That’s where organisations like Code Nation come in.I think Code Nation is a growing success story, and having met their staff and students, it’s clear that they are making a real difference in Greater Manchester.” We think so too. :) 120th Apprentice Jody and 600th Grad Natalja met the Mayor of Greater Manchester! If you like the sound of what we do, have a nosey on our website - www.wearecodenation.com/courses

Mayor of Greater Manchester champions city’s Code Nation

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