Infimum academia

Infinum Academy is an organized program of IT courses held at the level of the company’s regional offices (in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Podgorica and Skopje). These are courses on programming and application development in different programming languages (Spring, Kotlin, WordPress…) as well as courses on interface design. They are carried out in accordance with the availability of mentor-lecturers and are in the largest number of senior developers of Infinum, whose time is allocated in accordance with the requirements of the jobs they work on a daily basis.

Infinum Academy was launched in 2015 when the company, in the process of hiring new employees, noticed some differences in the knowledge of the then job candidates compared to the knowledge and skills used in the company’s projects. As technological progress is developing at a rapid pace, the theoretical knowledge that students acquire in faculties is not adapted to the processes and tools used in modern development.

Specifically, technical faculties in Croatia and other countries in our region provide students with basic technological knowledge and object programming skills, while Infinum courses are based on practical knowledge and work on real projects that the company performs for its clients. “This is the highest value of Infinum Academy. In addition, it’s done on an individual basis. Each student has his or her own dedicated mentor,” says Una Mihajlovic, director of Infinum Academy.

The programming courses last five weeks (the first four weeks of the courses are held twice, mostly on Mondays and Thursdays, and the last week is the consultation and completion of assignments that students complete at the Academy), and are conducted in a hybrid way – both in person and online, with the majority of students participating in person by attending classes at Infinum’s offices. “The point is that students are learning about the culture of working in IT, not just attending lectures,” explains Una Mihajlovic.

At the beginning of the Academy, the content focused on mobile app development technologies, iOS and Android, but the program was soon expanded to include courses on design as well as frontend and backend web app development. A large number of new courses were added last year, such as .NET, Flutter, DevOps and WordPress, and starting this fall, participants will also be able to enroll in the Quality Assurance (QA) course. “The foundation is the same and there are new technical changes happening in the latest versions of the tools we use on our projects and completely new courses,” says Una Mihajlovic.

Every student has to pass the entrance exam, but “if you’ve completed your second year of university, mastered object-oriented programming, the basics of Gita, understand basic algorithms and data structures in the field of computational cynetics, that should be enough pre-knowledge. Our website describes in detail what knowledge every candidate who wants to take the entrance exam should have, and there is a list of books we recommend,” says Una Mikhailovich.

Until last year, the Infinum Academy was exclusively for students, and since last year it has been open to anyone with satisfactory prior knowledge who wants to acquire the latest IT skills and thus achieve greater personal competitiveness in the European Union market and beyond.

So far, 470 people have graduated from the Infinum Academy in the last eight years. Hundreds of them have stayed at Infinum – some have become mentors in the Academy and several have reached management positions in the company. “A large number of Infinum Academy graduates are working in other, including Infinum, competitive IT companies in Croatia, but also in other countries, which further confirms the value of our education,” says Una Mihajlović.

New platform, global education

The new phase of development of the Infinum Academy programme lies in its organisational expansion to sister companies, Productive and Porsche Digital Croatia, which are now using Infinum’s education and upgrade platform to become a product that will be offered to customers in the future. “Last year we had a Flutter course for the first time and found that this kind of education is even a very rare commodity globally. We also found that there was a need for individual (customs) training for specific customers,” says Una.

Infinum is expanding its business, the company intends to open several more offices in different countries where Infinum Academy will be available to local people for free. The next step, says Una Mihajlovic, for now just a wish, is to offer Infinum’s education platform both outside the company’s offices and outside the subsidiaries in the countries where Infinum operates. The goal is to become an independent, globally accessible education. It is an extensive online curriculum that will be billed and offered to everyone in the world.

More details: https://infinum.academy