It is no news that Sweden is booming and that the Swedish tech industry is having a hard time finding the skills and talent they need. As Almega report shows, 70.000 people will be needed in the tech sector by 2024, leaving recruiters crying out for a fast and sustainable solution.
On the other end, most companies who are looking for developers want to hire people with extensive experience and are therefore looking for “Senior Developers”. However, they are often already stuck in long-term employment contracts, compromising companies from getting access to the skills needed in time, despite having attractive offers.
With the mission to find a solution to the urgent tech skills shortage in Sweden, Epicenter and Redmind decided to launch a new model to help fast-growing companies find developers.
Redmind is a venture studio, launched in 2008 in Stockholm, helping big companies innovate like start-ups, reducing the risk of failure and finding product-market fit faster.
With the pandemic, Redmind identified a new opportunity in the recruitment of developers. Due to canceled projects, layoffs, and other changes during the pandemic, a lot of employees working close to developers have gotten the opportunity to further enhance their career by learning programming and software development.
This means that today there are more developers on the market than before. However, according to many employers, this new group of talent is still seen as’ too junior’, despite their many years in the market.
“We meet many Project Managers and Product Owners who during the pandemic have opened up their interest in development and coding and therefore sought further education within this field. If you look at their long experience of leading the construction of advanced technical solutions, in combination with their new coding skills, they are a considerably undervalued asset” says Jean-Francois Moreau, Director of Innovation at Redmind.
Epicenter and Redmind are now picking the top talents from Sweden’s bootcamps, IT educations, and design schools – many of these being experienced product owners, with now hands-on coding skills. The program will start with a six months practical training at Redmind, working on actual projects to transform companies’ ideas into ready-to-use solutions. After finishing the program the candidates will be matched with scaleups within the Epicenter community.
“This year we have received over 300 applications for our program where we in the end selected the 40 best. We then prepared them for the practical reality of working as developers so that when they are ready, they can step into a company and directly create value” explains Jean-Francois.
“About 40% of Epicenter’s members consist of fast-growing companies where one of the most common problems we have encountered is the lack of developers and the technical expertise they need to build their products. Through our collaboration with Redmind, benefiting from their long experience in development and consulting, Epicenter will now be able to easily help members in solving that challenge” says Patrick Mesterton, CEO and founder of Epicenter.
Through working with companies such as Brick, WayToGo, Newsvoice or MoveEat, Redmind has extensive experience in helping companies designing and building world-class digital products for startups and enterprises. The collaboration aims at bringing experience and talents to a brand new level. According to Redmind, working with Epicenter is crucial to attract the top talents from Stockholm’s coding schools and increase their chances of employment.
“After meeting many developers over the years, it is clear that Epicenter is the only physical place in Stockholm that is vibrant and active enough to succeed in attracting the strongest candidates to our program. Epicenter also has a genuine interest in helping their member companies when facing challenges such as IT recruitment” says Jean-Francois, Director of Innovation at Redmind.
