Over 12,300 applicants for program of retraining in IT sector

Over 12,300 candidates applied for the contest for retraining in the IT sector, within which 900 citizens from all over Serbia will be trained to work as programmers, the Office for Information Technologies and eGovernment announced.

With nearly 14 applicants for each vacancy, the program organized and carried out by the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the Office for IT and eGovernment pointed to a great need for retraining in the fastest growing sector in Serbia.

– The candidates will go through a series of tests in the upcoming period aiming to determine their predisposition towards information technologies. The best 900 will get an opportunity to master some of the most popular programming languages, such as Java, Java Script, PHP, .Net and C, and the training courses will take three to six months. The process of selection will be completed by the end of the year – says Mihailo Jovanovic, director of the Office for IT and eGovernment.

He adds that 65% of the candidates are male, whereas 35% are female. Around 52% have graduated from a faculty, whereas 48% have finished high school or are faculty students. As many as 61% of them are unemployed.

– The average age of the applicants is 33, whereas the majority are under 35 – Jovanovic emphasizes.

The main goal of the retraining program is to reduce unemployment rate, increase the workforce in IT and develop competences in programming. It was created based on a survey which showed that 118 IT companies planned to employ around 1,000 junior programmers over the next year.

As the Office for IT and eGovernment said, this is a continuation of a successful pilot project initiated at the proposition by the Ministerial Council for Information Technologies and Innovative Entrepreneurship, presided over by Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, within which 97 candidates have been trained this year. As many as 70% of them attended professional practice and found a job in an IT company.

Vlada Republike Srbije

Kancelarija za informacione tehnologije i elektronsku upravu Beograd

Ministerial Council for Information Technologies and Innovative Entrepreneurship

retraining in IT sector

Mihailo Jovanovic

Ana Brnabic

programming

programming training

junior programmers

IT workforce

employing junior programmers

Java

Java Script

PHP

Net

C programming language