Future Skills with Sebastian Espinosa: teaching coding at scale

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Digital skills, particularly programming and coding, are in high demand in the job market, while there is a shortage of qualified professionals across the globe. In this interview, Sebastian Espinosa, managing director at Coding Dojo, a nine-year-old organization that teaches coding and data science, talks about skills development and training today and how to approach future challenges. Coding Dojo is one of the innovative training initiatives featured in the recently released GFCC report Future Skills: Lessons and Insights from a Review of Innovative Skills and Development Initiatives. You can download the report here.

GFCC: What are the main challenges in skills and training today?

Sebastian Espinosa: The main challenges are the speed of change and the amount of re-skilling and retraining needed in a short period of time.

GFCC: How is Coding Dojo approaching this challenge?

Espinosa: We do intense short programs that prepare people to get jobs. Basically, our bootcamps teach people the skills and abilities that are required to get a job in the tech world. Our main program teaches full-stack development for different segments of the population.

GFCC: What skills do you believe will prove to be most important in the labor market in the next 5 or 10 years?

Espinosa: We teach languages like Python, JavaScript and others, but most importantly we teach programming. Programming is an area where things are changing very fast. More than static knowledge, you need to be a continuous learner. We do that with programming, but we also do it with data science and cybersecurity.

GFCC: Where are you planning to settle after the US?

Espinosa: We’ve been to different parts of the world. Now, we are also running programs in Latin America (Chile, Perú, Ecuador, and Costa Rica); in eastern Europe (Albania), and in the Middle East (West Bank).

GFCC: What do your students study? What are they attracted by?

Espinosa: Students come from different backgrounds. Some are just finishing high school and want something to take into the marketplace and workplace. Others are university graduates: some have a technical background and others studied something else — others are working in something completely different. You could lose your job and come here for new skills to look for a job again.

GFCC: What makes your approach to skill training unique?

Espinosa: I would say it’s having a very good curriculum that has been perfected over 8 to 10 years. Having our own instructors that create and handle the curriculum. Being very market-oriented: we check, take what’s required in the market and create a new curriculum. Also, this combination of training on-site and online. It’s the content, having our own structures and technically we’re the only bootcamp in the world that teaches three full stacks in 14 weeks. Because you learn different languages, you also see the patterns between the different languages.

GFCC: Do you think this skills training methodology is scalable to a national or global level?

Sebastian: We're trying to replicate this method in other places and it’s totally possible. The need is everywhere. Companies cannot find the talent that they’re looking for in this area. It’s a good opportunity and what we do is totally transferable. We can teach others how to do it.