1.0 -WhenKnowledgeMeetsAbility

A team of experts from Serbia has developed a method that enables fast training in a wide range of IT industry areas, thus providing a response to the demands of the contemporary global labour market that doesn’t require leaving the home

The pulsating labour market provides education systems across the planet with ever more difficult tasks to undertake year on year. The rapid development of new technologies, particularly in the IT sector, demands a much greater capacity for the qualification of future personnel that existing educational methodologies are simply unable to keep pace with without the labour market suffering.

A team of authors from Serbia, comprising experts from the fields of education, communications, human resources and IT, has since 2018 been developing a new method for transferring knowledge that can be immediately applied in practice upon completion. This hybrid methodology, based on the utilisation of all the advantages of multimedia and online communication, was revised following the COVID-19 epidemic, due to the vast experiences gained during the conducting of online teaching and working from home that highlighted a range of problems that hadn’t been not recognised prior to the epidemic. It showed that Ciklotron, as this methodology is called, was ready to respond to the demands of the modern labour market even before the tribulations brought by the response to the pandemic.

Over the course of the training courses, which are implemented in programmes lasting 3, 6 and 9 months each, Ciklotron initially prepares IT personnel in the domains of Quality Assurance, Full Stack 2.0, DevOps and Blockchain. With the selecting of these programmes, participants gain the ability to broadly recognise their place in the IT industry, but also to maximise their chances of gaining employment as quickly as possible by care- fully choosing the training they will receive.

With the applying of the latest technologies in the development of this method, another major problem that’s resolved to a great extent is the lack of high-quality teaching staff. In Ciklotron, classrooms are designed such a way that they reduce the number of hours required by lecturers by up to 40%, whether that’s in the process of imparting knowledge or in the testing process. However, in order to avoid the sense of alienation of virtual classrooms, the programme envisages gatherings of lecturers and participants in a frequency that will enable them to develop personal contacts, which are, according to the methodology’s creators, essential to the high-quality professional and personal development of participants.

A significant characteristic of this methodology is also the scalability of the number of participants, which is conditioned solely by the request in specific projects, and the authors are hopeful that this very fact will result in Ciklotron being accepted as a national platform for IT education by the end of this year.

It is a well-known fact that the IT industry has for decades been crying out for trained personnel, though unfortunately trends often change when it comes to the required knowhow in this field, and at Ciklotron they believe that flexibility in the selection of programmes is a requirement to respond to foreign IT companies that are increasingly arriving in Serbia in search of competent workers.

IT employers, under the pressure of the daily challenges posed by the industry, are interested exclusively in personnel who are able to perform specific tasks in a certain period of time and to a high quality.

The creators of the Ciklotron methodology are convinced that they can train new personnel who won’t only have the knowhow, but will also the ability to fulfil the demands of employers at the highest level.