Our foundation is always ready to help out partner with others to help the youth of Bosnia & Herzegovina. Last year we partnered up with Codecta, a Sarajevo IT company to deliver a comprehensive upskilling program consisting of Codecta’s QA academy, combined with our Enterprise skills academy. The QA academy is a 6 month program to upskills young people as Software Test Automation Engineers.

In parallel to the QA academy, the foundation made available key personnel in order to teach these up and coming talents about the importance of other enterprising skills (soft skills). We delivered three comprehensive workshops as part of the overall experience in which 40 young people in the QA academy participated

Debunking the recruitment process by Facebook & KPMG

Delivered by Serdzan Arnautovic from Facebook and Ida Manko from KPMG, over 100 students from BH Futures Foundation and the Codecta Academy participated learning what it takes to get recruited, CV’s, Cover letters, interviewing and much more. More can be found out by reading Serdzan’s linkedin article.

Leadership Essentials by Milan Kusmuk

During the workshop, Milan (BH Futures Foundation board member and one of our early scholars) aimed to expose participants to specific situations in which the leader needs to analyze and make decisions, which affect the business, the teams they lead and the work culture they promote. The teams solved the problem in parallel and gave their solutions. Different approaches led them to learn from each other first in the team and then through discussion with the other team. After learning by doing approaches, Milan introduced participants to the basic skills that a leader should possess and the workshop ended with a short presentation on leadership styles by Daniel Goleman.

Effective Teamwork by Milan Kusmuk

The workshop was designed under the assumption that the participants already had basic experience in working with teams, and that certain frustrations and some positive experiences had already been created. Participants learned about the difference between a group and a team, and how a group transforms into an effective team. They were also introduced to the stages of transformation, developed by Susan Wheelan. Since most teams do not enter the third phase due to conflict, non-cooperation and misunderstanding of other team members, unclear goals and poor communication, the focus was on understanding personality types as an important factor for developing communication and building relationships among members. The participants were very active and showed interest. They were not familiar with these segments we believe that this will help them significantly.

We hope that after these workshops and training that these young software automation testers can head into a career with more confidence in their abilities. We wish them all well and hope to see them doing incredible things over the next few years.

Huge thank you to Milan Kusmuk, Ida Manko and Serdzan Arnautovic and our friends at Codecta for the collaboration.

Enterprise skills academy completed for Codecta QA student engineers