Last week I decided to share the news that my company Codaisseur went bankrupt publicly on LinkedIn. It took me a few days to decide before I did it. It's embarrassing, it can be risky to share it so openly, and it can trigger all kinds of reactions in the people involved – but I don't regret that I did it. The power of education is humbling. So many people reached out with inspiring stories of how their education with us improved their lives forever. The reactions that my post triggered are the fuel for Techmongers. Going bankrupt is obviously not a fun thing to go through. Still, it does provide a unique learning experience – especially in the time leading up to the eventual bankruptcy and the time after that.

Over the past eight years, we helped some 600 people change their positions to a career in software development. In the early days, I often found myself on the phone battling scepticism; we had to work hard to convince employers to hire the junior developers we educated, but as we progressed, it became normal to hire junior developers, and we got more and more competitors. Reading the comments under my LinkedIn post about how it ended, it is clear Codaisseur had a huge impact on people's lives by providing them with affordable and accessible education, but this happened because employers bought into our ideas of hiring junior developers. By doing so, we helped make big waves in the labour market together: in the past decade, the number of people who work in IT almost doubled. That is nice, but with 5 out of 6 IT vacancies unfulfilled, there is still a lot of work to do, and Techmongers is here to take it a step further and help organisations grow their tech teams: in numbers, skills, and knowledge.

Instead of looking for talent that does not exist, Techmongers offers organisations to create this talent together: by building tailored tech academies that teach the skills and technologies that are needed. Building a great learning community and creating and maintaining high quality course materials is very important if we want to make lasting changes in this labour market. That is why we are building the Techmongers Academy: a full service tech academy that teaches everything modern tech organisations need: Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, DevOps & DevSecOps, and soon: Data Science, Low/No-Code, Software Testing, UI & UX Design, and Growth Hacking. All of it built on  award winning teaching methods we developed over the past decade.

It is ambitious, sure. But we need to invest so much more in education together if we want to close the talent gap in IT. So many organisations and people depend on tech to provide everything from live-saving services to pure entertainment. Most modern companies are tech companies to some extent. We teach tech skills to lawyers, accountants, medical doctors, construction engineers, artists, and many, many more. None of them learned this in school, and that's why we need to pull our weight together. Now. Because having 80% of IT vacancies going unfulfilled is pushing business the wrong way. It's not a coincidence that none of the Big Five are in Europe. For a long time, and maybe still, IT is considered a "tool" to "automate processes". It's not. It's humanity's new way of life. We have a whole generation of consumers that expects high quality, innovative tech products, and not the next bookkeeping software. Don't get me wrong, we need good bookkeeping software too, and there may be a very innovative way of doing bookkeeping that is going to wow us because it actually fits the category I just mentioned, but in general, we lack big innovative tech here in Europe. And one of the reasons is: we don't have enough tech knowledge and software engineering skills. So let's change that together by creating specialised education tracks to grow innovative organisations where they need it!