The Informal School of IT in Romania

The Informal School of IT was launched in Romania in 2013, and since then it has created the opportunity for more than 15,000 graduates to find professional orientation related to jobs in the IT industry.

The School provides students with mentors with strong technical background and vast professional experience, a flexible and easy to adopt learning schedule, and technical educational programs adapted and kept up to date with the latest market requirements and trends.

The courses calibrated to the current market needs, the flexible schedule, the access to the community of experienced mentors, the soft-skill sessions, and the technical mentorship and coaching sessions represent a set of good practices to support graduates to move forward in their potential IT professional paths.

On the side of the students, this informal process mixing training, coaching, and mentoring, facilitates graduates to approach a career in the IT industry and to acquire sufficient technical skills to carry out a technical job interview successfully. At system level, The Informal School of IT has become a bridge that connects the educational system and the labor market. All courses are aligned with specific needs of IT companies and include both soft skills and career training sessions, for a complete learning experience. The impact can be easily observed throughout the entire IT market in Romania, with the School’s learning programs helping to address the ever-growing need for IT specialists and creating a new recruitment channel for employers.

Furthermore, The Informal School of IT experience has proven that learning digital skills is not dependent on age, gender, previous studies, professional experience etc. Students come from a variety of industries (HORECA to arts, banking, theology, sales, sociology, tourism, and so on) and there is no age limit to sign up. The only condition for enrolling is the knowledge of Romanian, since students can access courses online, from anywhere in Romania or even the world.

The initiative was launched in Cluj-Napoca in 2013, and then expanded to 6 more of the biggest IT hubs in Romania (Bucharest, Iași, Timișoara, Brașov, Craiova, and Sibiu) and to the Republic of Moldova, taking the established good practices developed in Cluj-Napoca to all these new locations. Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, all the courses were moved online, making the School even more effectively accessible to all Romanian speakers passionate about IT.