The tuition-free coding school Academy+Plus officially opened in Bucharest this week. The school is operating in a partnership with private companies.

It will train 140 IT specialists over the next six to nine months, through an educational process based on practice and team work.

Among the first partners of the school are Societe Generale European Business Services, BNP Paribas Personal Finance Central Europe Technologies and Orange. The companies will support the educational program of the school with mentors, helping the students train to the demands of the market.

“The role of the mentors is to help students advance as fast and as appropriate as possible, but, at the same time, another role is to show them the values of their companies, their work methods and their types of projects,” Daniela Buşcan, program director with Academy+Plus, said.

“Romania currently has a deficit in the IT industry of 50,000 specialists. By getting companies directly involved in the process of educating the future IT professionals, we have the opportunity to reduce this deficit and train the future specialists in accordance with the market demands,” she added.

Besides training future IT specialists, the school also offers corporate trainings, for those who wish to learn new technologies. It makes available technologies and frameworks such as PHP/Symfony, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, iOS/Swift, and Android/Javascript. This type of training entails intensive boot camps, which last 14 days. At these boot camps, a technology is learned through a hands-on project.

Academy+Plus is part of the international network of École 42 from Paris, which has centers in Paris, Kiev, Chișinău, Johannesburg and Fremont, Silicon Valley. Academy+Plus opened a programming school in Cluj-Napoca in 2014. It trained 198 students in Cluj between 2014 and 2016, and 110 of them were hired by IT companies.

French group supports first free coding school in Bucharest

editor@romania-insider.com