How Can Your Employer Branding Bring Real Value to Students?

The middle of the holiday season is here and so is the academic year already far behind us. That’s a great time to sum up our cooperation with universities in the first half of 2017. New Data Lab in Warsaw, free programming courses and CEOs sharing the secrets of their success — check out what we have done!

University Relations — why is it so important?

For us, here at Daftcode, it’s really important to do as much as we can to help students in their development. When we compare the last few decades to the previous ones, the job market is changing faster than ever — especially in the tech industry, where the shortage of specialists is huge. So instead of waiting for “tons of programmers” to come out from nowhere, we prefer to act and support universities in educating students. As a fast growing company, we also feel like it’s kind of “our duty” to share our knowledge and experience with those who want to acquire skills desired in the labor market. So… how do we do that?

Series of workshops at universities

Java, C++, C# — these have been the common programming languages taught at universities for years. But there’s a rising need on the market for specialists qualified also in other technologies. For this reason we decided to enrich educational offer of the top Warsaw universities by organizing special courses. Since the Daftcode Laboratory opening in 2015, our specialists organize regular workshops on “iOS Programming Basics” at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics (University of Warsaw), where students can learn the Apple’s programming platform. During that time, we also decided to begin a series of workshops called “Introduction to Programming in Python” at the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science (Warsaw University of Technology). The first editions of courses showed us that these were really great initiatives! For students — because they had the opportunity to learn during their studies from people who have practical experience. For us — because we had well-prepared candidates for internships (and some of them are now working with us as developers!).

This semester — in contrast to earlier editions aimed at beginners — we wanted to put both of the courses to a higher level. In this way, series of “Level Up” workshops were created — not only for Python and iOS but also for Machine Learning. The interest among students exceeded our expectations! To meet their needs we decided to extend the number of spots. At the same time, we have also established a new cooperation — together with Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology we have launched a new course for Ruby on Rails beginners. This way more students could learn something new.

MI² DataLab — a new space for Data Scientists in Warsaw

Data Scientists belong to the group of the most desirable specialists on the market and thorough education in this area is more than crucial for their future employers. We know that complex projects, focused on building new analytical tools and IT solutions in the Data Science area, require good facilities. That’s why we decided to support the launch of a new Data Science laboratory at the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science of the Warsaw University of Technology (MiNI PW).

The laboratory has been created thanks to the cooperation of MI² Group — researchers and students from the MiNI PW and MIM UW Faculties, and Nethone — member of Daftcode Group, which is a provider of AI-based Anti-Fraud and Business Intelligence solutions. The mission of MI² DataLab is to create new solutions for advanced analysis, processing and visualization of data. We believe that this place will enable students and postgraduates to develop their skills through workshops, hackathons and numerous meetups which will be organized in the laboratory.

Here you can check out a short movie from the grand opening of MI² DataLab and the first workshops!

CEO Academy — secrets shared by C-Level Executives

Students at the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) are rather used to a lot of employer branding activities from huge corporations. Showing up at this university for the first time, as Daftcode Group, we wanted to prepare something different for them — something they haven’t taken part in before. CEOs of fast growing Polish startups sharing secrets of their success with students? Why not! In collaboration with the elite international CEMS studies we launched “CEO Academy” — a series of seminars focused on global expansion strategies for tech startups. The number of applications exceeded our wildest expectations — it showed us that organizing this kind of seminars is a really good idea. Students appreciated the possibility to learn directly from CEOs and listen about real-life business strategies that helped them succeed in the global market.

After a series of lectures with CEOs at SGH, we prepared a day-long workshop at our office to summarize all the seminars of CEO Academy. During that day students were challenged to prepare a Go-To-Market strategy for a real-life digital product. After the final challenge, all students and CEOs were invited to informal banquet where the winners’ announcement took place. The members of winning team were rewarded with iPads but it wasn’t the only prize we prepared. Eight chosen students had also a special opportunity to take part in individual Mentorship Days run by CEOs from the Daftcode Group. Yet that’s not all — the most outstanding students were offered to join strategy planning and business development teams within our group.

Summer time = time for an internship!

Summer internships are a great opportunity for students to gain first-hand experience in their chosen career field. It’s also a valuable occasion to check if a particular career path is a good fit. And here at Daftcode, we also want to give them this chance. This year, we decided to put up the number of intern spots and organize internships not only for young programmers but also for students who wanted to join our Design and Social Media teams.

When interns joined Daftcode, we wanted them not only to get to know our company better, but also to find out what the hashtag #ItsReallyFunToWorkHere really means. That’s why after the Onboarding Day we organized a welcome party for all of them. One of the biggest Virtual Reality centers in Poland — that was our place of destiny where integration during playing VR games turned out to be a great idea!

Creating mutual benefits

So here you could read about some examples of our employer branding activities dedicated to students which took place in the first half of 2017. But it’s not the end of the list! We strongly believe that continuous cooperation with student organizations, university authorities and professors can be really fruitful for all sides. That’s why while organizing our own initiatives, we also couldn’t forget about being involved in other projects aimed at students, like mentoring at hackathons organized at universities, supporting students on writing a graduate thesis or sponsoring prizes for competitions conducted by student organizations. We also give students the opportunity to meet with us face to face during job fairs or other events and meetups like e.g. PyLight which is co-organized by our employees and dedicated to beginners who want to start their adventure with Python.

As a growing company with 150 people on board, we’re doing our best to engage in more and more educational projects focused on programming and related fields. When we sum up all courses, workshops and seminars we’ve organized so far in 2017, over 350 students took part in our initiatives! As a result, we had more than 500 applications for our Summer Internship Programme. We’re very proud that so many young people are interested in developing their skills with our help. We’re also very happy that our activities — while increasing our brand awareness — can provide added value to students.

Want to read about our previous campaigns? Check out the post on Hacking Employer Branding!

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