AS I SEE IT: TERRY MURDEN says Scotland will be poorer for the demise of the digital training academy
The creation of an innovative digital training academy in 2015 to help nurture Scotland’s nascent tech sector was greeted with huge enthusiasm and even gave the fledgling Daily Business an early scoop. On Friday we revealed that CodeClan had appointed liquidators, a sad end to a project that had given the Scottish tech sector a widely-recognised advantage.
CodeClan, which occupied offices next door to tech incubator CodeBase at the foot of the castle, offered something beyond the typical training facility. It was based on a new breed of intensive coding schools such as Makers, launched in London in 2013; Stackademy in Berlin, and the Flatiron School in New York.
It took individuals of any age and experience and retrained them in the newly-required software skills such as design and programming. In the process it was helping to create a home-grown supply of labour for the burgeoning tech sector. It expanded from its Edinburgh base into Glasgow and Inverness and helped promote Scotland to inward investors and entrepreneurs as a forward thinking nation.
It worked with more than 300 industry partners, including Skyscanner, FanDuel, DC Thomson, BlackRock, Tesco Bank, and Sainsbury’s Bank. It launched the CodeClan Youth Academy with the support of Baillie Gifford, an eight-week programme for young people aged 17 and over, designed to provide the kind of programming skills required in an industry environment. In February it signed a deal with recruitment agency Eden Scott.
In November last year, after her appointment as its third CEO, Loral Quinn announced plans to “scale the operation” and help fill 20,000 software jobs. CodeClan, she said, was “perfectly placed to help close the digital skills gap, and the current hiring and upskilling crisis”.
The liquidator said that market conditions have hit the flow of business placements, which tells us that the sector is not burgeoning quite as much as we’d like to believe. Inverness was closed two years ago.
Even so, there has to be longer term value in this project and there are already calls to help get it back on its feet, including a crowdfund, or for the government to step in. Along with the pitching competition Scottish Edge, it was a favourite of the former minister John Swinney who made a number of visits to the academy.
It surely fits perfectly with the government’s digital economy strategy which led to the appointment of chief entrepreneur Mark Logan, whose plans for tech scalers and restructuring of education to meet the digital agenda will take a severe blow from CodeClan’s demise.
At the time of writing there was nothing more than a holding statement from the government, and nothing of note from any minister to prove that Holyrood really has a digitally-beating heart.
Terry Murden held senior positions at The Sunday Times, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and The Northern Echo and is now editor of Daily Business
What they’re saying on LinkedIn….
Chuks Ododo
Founding Member & Community Connecting Manager – DataKirk SCIO
CodeClan is playing a critical role in the Scottish tech ecosystem. Something should be done to rescue it because the impacts on the shortage skills gap within the ecosystem will be huge. We have a job to do.
____
Richard Haigh
Consultant at Dufrain
Could not agree more. Scotlands tech sector is one of the jewels in the crown. We have a massive skill gap and I truly do not understand the government not stepping in. We need grads with software skills more than ever.
____
Stuart Ure
Trainee software developer at CodeClan
I am one of the students who has been affected by this. I am furious it has happened, and how it has happened. Longer term questions need to be answered, shorter term I hope the tech industry can rally around not only the staff and instructors who are excellent, but also recently graduated and from a selfish point of view students who were in the heart of studying only to have it ripped away. I created a Just giving to help support the instructors and to allow students in the middle of training a way to keep going. It’s on my page if anyone can shares it. Thank you.
____
Alistair Forbes
Founding Director and CEO, Scottish Tech Army, global technology entrepreneur and executive, Angel Investor, Business Mentor
Terry Murden – there are obviously short term and long term issues. I don’t know the details of the business at all but clearly it would have to look different for the long term and I’m guessing that means a leaner organisation.
In the short term, there are people that have left jobs, moved home (some with families) and made the investment in their future so finding a way to help them finish their courses is the priority.
____
John Paul Speirs
Volunteer at Scottish Tech Army
I’ve got great mates affected and I’m absolute gutted for them.
As a CC grad I’ve been watching the Codeclan job board for a year and the opportunities were few in number. Seems the partners were not hiring and grad placement kick backs were not there to balance the books. Meanwhile the cohorts were graduating full pelt every 8 weeks. It was all systems go until the absolute worst happened. Sure it was a great place to be but the rigid model only worked in the good times and was unable to change course. I’m sure there’s much more too it. I totally agree. A post mortem is required before a reboot.
I sold business systems for 43 years for Oracle, NCR, Burroughs in Scotland,, London and abroad to organisations such as BP,Shell, William Hill, Mitsubishi, Amazon, BA, NHS Scotland, Police and many others large and small. Working alongside brilliant techies and software development companies. Latterly contracting with smaller software co’s.
These were hard nosed vendors and harder nosed customers and the employees were mostly computer science grads from good universities.
I think Scottish IT is seriously in decline. If there are 20k vacancies why are we relying on boot camps instead of getting the universities to design courses that will
rigorously prepare people with the skills that employers need?
If you look at the IT and computer graduate lists of the serious Scottish universities there are very few Scots there. The Scottish IT quangoes have a very hard job to move the dial and haven’t succeeded. Mind you the leadership is appalling. I’ll never forget then Finance Minister Derek MacKay doing the keynote at the ScotlandIS conference in 2016 and wittering on about his Sinclair X5.
A proper drain up by people who know how the industry ticks is badly needed.