CodeClan’s achievements should not be forgotten - Nick Freer

After a really difficult week for all those concerned, and what I gather was an inordinate amount of activity in the background, yesterday’s communique was a silver lining to a grey cloud that has hung over our tech scene since last Friday. In addition to the CodeClan trainers, there is also a collective hope that the non-training staff will find new roles in quick time.

If this happens, it will show that not only can we recycle talent, but also that the Scottish tech ecosystem can be characterised by empathy and caring. This would also equate to some form of natural justice, when you consider that CodeClan’s raison d’être was to help people find employment in Scotland’s tech sector.

As the operation formerly known as CodeClan morphs into a new existence, I wanted to share some takeaways from the CodeClan I knew before operations ceased and the liquidators were called in.

Irrespective of the underlying financial picture, what the CodeClan team achieved over the years should be lauded. Over two thousand graduates in software development and data, graduates who were then placed with leading corporate brands - companies like Skyscanner, FanDuel, Baillie Gifford, DC Thomson, BlackRock, and Tesco Bank.

What shouldn’t be forgotten is that graduates also joined much smaller companies, including startups that only had a handful of people in total. In these companies, they often became key workers from day one.

CodeClan was also a well-documented champion for women in tech, bringing to attention the alarming statistics on how few women are forecast to gain employment in a UK tech job market predicted to grow six-fold to £30 billion by 2025, and providing funded, free, and on demand courses to address this.

Similarly, a series of CodeClan youth academies around the country aimed to support young people, often from marginalised communities, positioned to get an overlooked demographic of the population into tech jobs.

Hopefully, the transplanted CodeClan 2.0 offering will continue to be all this and more.

Summer swing

In spite of some sporadic family vacation time in Scotland over the last few weeks, I once again failed to fully commit to the out of office setting during the always elusive, so-called ‘summer break’.

But hey ho, business doesn’t stop and newspaper printing continues to roll when the sun reaches its highest arc in the northern hemisphere.

Don’t worry, I still made it to the beach (and Sutherland’s beaches still take some beating in my book)…only with the laptop packed alongside the sun cream and sandwiches.