Professional skill gaining in a real work environment simulator
Tailored, self-paced learning journey
Enter IT: prove your competence to our partner employers
/nəːd/ noun
A person devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests.
Our principles
Get job-ready by following not yet another bootcamp but a guided path to successfully build your own advanced project.
Within our projects we teach you the value of good practices on real coding challenges and by providing constructive feedback to any mistake.
All your success and effort will be quantitatively mapped within your profile - ready to professionally expand your CV.
Our authentic projects provide you exclusive insight on how the real work environment looks like.
Benefit from good practise teachings on how to give and receive feedback through peer reviews.
Get real life support by asking questions to community and cooperation on pair programming.
Forget writing time-consuming motivation letters and resumes. You apply by successfully completing an academy and showing off your skills.
We believe in our alumni thus we actively refer them to our partner companies. Our goal is to lift you to your next level.
Start learning
Project
Seeking new challenges or to experiment with new languages or frameworks? Build exciting real-life products to grow and learn valuable coding skills.
Benefits
Academy
No endless resume-writing and job offer browsing any longer. Get job-ready and level up your skills within a remote learning challenge with like-minded peers.
Benefits
Entering IT doesn't have to be a struggle. We show you how.
Testimonials
Joining with the goal to grow from junior to mid level developer, Janusz not only experienced the set up and interaction within the nerds.family as motivational and helpful but received much more than ever expected: he discovered new enthusiasm towards programming, reached his growth goal and finally landed a new job shortly after. As he summarises it “For me it paid off.”
Jakub joined the family with the ambitious dream to turn his hobby into a paying job. After being overwhelmed by endless tutorials and learning materials, he finally found a structured and clear learning path at nerds.family which allows to “focus on essentials that will benefit the most”. Within months he gained the needed skill set and brought his dream to life.
Feeling stuck after completing other courses, Mateusz discovered nerds.family when being on the look out for improving his skills in Ruby on Rails. It led him to giving a chance to nerds.family where the story took a turn. Mateusz quickly outgrew his own code by working his project and receiving support by the community and mentors. He switched then to a “new, really cool job” and now spreads the word among friends.
There are several key differences between our academies and single projects that we offer. To name the most relevant, it would be the following: - projects do not include mentor reviews of your code (peer review only) - projects do not offer any team experience (you work your project by yourself) - projects are not tied to any talent referral or job application (but grow your portfolio and skill set) - no free career and learning consultation.
As you might see, projects are simply speaking the ideal choice for you if you are on the look out for e.g. new experiences, skill growth, variety or portfolio extension. While academies are rather job-oriented and focused on professionalizing your skill set, providing you a real life work-environment experience and connecting you with the ideal employer to ease your career start.
To ease the visualization you can compare an academy with an online course you might have completed in the past. However, we'd like to strongly emphasize that it's not the same as any regular course. Instead it is a combination of a supportive and structured learning journey and real-life work environment simulation. And last but not least: any partner company academy (the ones labeled with any other company name than nerds.family) aims to offer the best performing students a position as a junior dev within the very company. Not like any other course - told you.
Within an academy participants or students (that's what we prefer to call our nerds ♥️) interact and learn professional coding skills, soft skills and technologies through simulated real-life employment conditions and live interaction with team members, alumni and mentors. Let's point out some key facts on what an academy looks like:
Everything during the program is designed to best reflect the experience of working as a Junior Developer while abstaining new coding skills and professionalizing your competencies. Not to forget the most important parts: enjoying the growth journey with other fellow juniors, soon to be juniors, code enthusiasts and maybe soon to be friends and the probability of impressing your potential future employer while doing so (and landing the dream job).
For all people drawn to and familiar with computers, already having some first experience with code or anyone wanting to get started with it. Also beneficial to:
You can apply for jobs at our partner companies through their active academies to maximize your chances to actually land the desired and offered position (check our currently active academies for that). If you don't want to invest the time and effort into academy participation, you can submit your application(s) directly to any available job offers on our job board (check our currently available job offers for that).
Please note:
Whether you will receive a job offer after academy completion depends on various factors but especially on your performance. Please keep in mind that only the best performing students receive a job offer by the concerned academy's partner company (free academies) or even nerds.family (if you're completing a paid academy or if we are in big need to grow our team. :))
Either way, if you give your best and show your dedication, chances are high that you will be the lucky one or one of the lucky ones to receive the job offer after academy completion. In case this won't be the case, hold your horses - it's not game over yet! There are two more options waiting for you: You might either receive a job offer from nerds.family to join our team (given we are on the lookout for new team members) or one of our partner companies might reach out to you thanks to the talent referral we do for our students.
FREE academy
Pros
* for details please always check the concerned academy's page
Cons
PAID academy
Pros
* provided we have open vacancies
Cons
The average duration of an academy is 2-4 months with an estimated daily workload of 2 hours. It may slightly differ between some academies and very much depends on your performance and dedication.
The registration process for any academy always requires you to create your free account with nerds.family as the very first step. Afterwards, the process differs a little, depending on what type of academy you decide to join (a free or a paid academy).
FREE academy
PAID academy
There are several paths you can choose from at nerds.family to land your IT job successfully. Let's have a closer look on these:
Free Academies
By joining free academies you enter a determined and guided path of professionalizing your skills and simply leveling up within a short period of time. With the goal in mind of bringing yourself in the position of having the required skill set and experience to start working as a Junior Developer, you will be able to impress potential employers with your proven dedication and qualification. The traditional application is being replaced by your performance and completion of the academy - forget about endless writing of resumes, CVs or motivation letters. After having successfully completed one of the academies your user profile is being forwarded to your potential employer (our partner companies), providing you a great benefit compared to any of your competitors during job search and making the application as hassle-free as possible for you.
On top of that, in case you happen to not receive a job offer, nerds.family will actively promote and refer you as a proven talent to our partner companies. Fingers crossed!
Paid Academies
By joining paid academies you enter a determined and guided path of professionalizing your skills and simply leveling up within a short period of time.
After having successfully completed your academy attendance, you will be in the position to land your desired job by having gained the needed skills, build an impressive user performance profile and project portfolio proving that, ready to impress potential employers. nerds.family supports you with that by actively promoting and referring you to our partner companies as a promising talent, until you land your dream job. So don't be surprised when being approached by our partner companies right after academy completion. P.S. We even might send you an offer to join our team.
Job offers
By going the quickest way possible you have the possibility to see currently available jobs on our job board and apply right away. You benefit from nerds.family having trust in our partner companies and only cooperating with companies whose culture and work ethics we approve of. Though keep in mind that your chances of being the chosen one are significantly lower than by attending an academy (given there is an active academy for the concerned position). It's up to you to go the very traditional way and submit a resume via email, but let's not talk about the probable success-rate of that.
For developer work and functions performed, IT relies on both: individual and group work. The entire program of nerds.family academies was created around the goal of letting our students experience both - independent work and the benefits of supportive teamwork. What you won't find is group assignments though.
When talking IT, the communication language within the real world work environment is primarily English. In diverse teams and the day to day tasks of a developer, team meetings, demo presentation etc. English is often the only common language. Thus our academies are in English. This includes all materials, tasks and hints. Besides that our entire app interface is also created in English only.
Of course! You will be able to make the application available online immediately after the first sprint. Please note that during an academy we do not learn the front-end, so it is solely up to you how your application will look like.
When attending and successfully completing academies, you benefit from nerds.family actively advocating and promoting you as a proven and trusted talent towards our partner companies. That means that we actively approach and inform our partners about your qualifications and refer you as an ideal candidate to fill their open position (provided you meet the role requirements). That results in you having a much easier access to great, reliable job offers and employers. From our experience this also results in highly successful long-term employment and career development. Win-win!
The whole experience of nerds.family academies is unlike any other. Just like we perceive and value the uniqueness of our students, so is the set up of academies designed to meet those unique needs, strengths and weaknesses to help you grow in the best way possible. The assignments are somewhat “up to you” (interactive, conditional design). Throughout any academy, you will build your own fully functional application - by yourself but with our support at any step along the way. While doing so, each of your decisions on how to implement the current task and each line of code you write has a direct impact on what your next task will be. At the end of each academy there will be participants having built the very same application but each of their experiences and steps on getting there will be unique. Same applies to their learnings.
If you are looking for above-average junior talent and a out of the box recruitment approach, we're just the right fit.
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