Escola 42. Students converted to technology at zero cost earn up to two thousand euros after six months

A bottomless pit. This is how the shortage of technological talent appears in Portugal, considered the second country in the world with more difficulty in hiring qualified workers, according to a report by ManpowerGroup. Even if studies were lacking, the eagerness for specialised professionals in this area would easily be proven by the daily buzz at 42, a free programming school that sees its students receiving a dozen offers per week to embark on the job market. This after only six months, even before they finish their two-year training.

And those who assume that early recruitment will somehow hurt their salary are wrong: net salaries can range from 1,500 to 2,000 euros a month. In the case of those who choose to finish the course, depending on the speciality and their own merit, "there's no limit to what they can get", says the director of the institution, Pedro Santa Clara, in an interview with Dinheiro Vivo.

Besides the guarantee of being well paid, this is also a flexible profession, which allows professionals to choose where and how they work. Basically, benefits that, among so many others, have led to more than 27,000 people seeking out 42 Lisbon since it opened in July 2020 - an overall number that rises to 33,000 when considering interest in the Porto school, which opened in July this year. Of all the applicants, who are not required to have experience in the area, 600 were selected to undertake the training in the capital and 200 in Invicta.

The average age of 42 students in Portugal is 27, with ages ranging from 17 to 53. The profiles, which include 17 different nationalities, are also varied: young people who have recently finished secondary school; university students dissatisfied with their experience; professionals from the most varied areas who have technological projects in mind; and people who, for economic reasons, abandoned their studies, had to start work and see programming as an opportunity to change their lives.

A 42 is a software development school that belongs to an international network of 46 counterparts around the world. It is a non-profit project, financed by 31 patrons - including Santander, Vanguard Properties and Mercedes-benz.io - who provide the possibility of free training in one of the 17 areas of specialisation offered by the institution.

The motivation to invest in this initiative is, at first, philanthropic. However, many of the companies that decide to do so "are also interested in hiring talent to develop internal technological projects", highlights the responsible, giving the example of the 42 of Wolfsburg, in Germany, totally financed by Volkswagen, "because it realized that the automobile future passes through digital and, for this reason, it needed to have an advanced school nearby".

On the other hand, "there has been very little public interest in supporting a project like this", laments the director. Why? Most likely because they don't know the operational advantage of the school, he says. "Per year, a student at 42 costs approximately one fifth of what a student at a university costs." Given the fact that in Portugal there is currently a shortage of 100,000 people with this profile and universities are unable to respond, according to the head, the 42 will be responsible for "contributing with the scale" that is possible.

Without teachers or schedules, the teaching method of the 42 says goodbye to the traditional and bets on innovation, through a digital platform that allows students to learn based on real projects and collaboration between peers. "Instead of teaching people, what we do is give them a succession of progressively more complicated challenges, leaving it up to them to research all the knowledge necessary to solve them," explains Pedro Santa Clara.

Open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, the programming school allows learning, although in person, to be done at an individual pace, under the guidance of a pedagogical team. This model "changes people's mindset", who acquire a sense of responsibility, "growing as individuals" and "developing skills that make a difference in a professional".