HP and Code Camp partner to teach students skills of the future

HP Australia has partnered with training company Code Camp to help empower a new generation of local technology professionals.

Code Camp, which started three years ago out of the Fishburners co-working space in Sydney, is aiming to teach 200,000 Australian students how to code by 2020.

Under the new partnership, HP is providing new computers to allow Code Camp to reach children in public schools across the country.

HP Australia director of personal systems Paul Gracey said he hoped the initiative would help give school students the skills they needed to meet the requirements of the future workforce, and prepare them for jobs that may not yet exist.

"We're looking at what the skills of tomorrow will be. It's not because we have a skill gap today, but it's because we don't want one tomorrow," he said.

"Recently, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) skilled jobs grew at about 1.5 times the rate of other jobs ... A report by the Regional Australia Institute and NBN has also found that one in two Australians will need skills in programming, software development and building digital technology to remain competitive in the coming years."

In the past three years Code Camp has taught about 18,000 students to code via school holiday camps, after-school clubs and in-school classes. It also teaches parents and school teachers coding skills.

Code Camp will also join HP at the upcoming EduTECH conference, the largest education technology event in the Asia Pacific. The camp's school teacher training sessions will also be taught at HP's customer welcome centres in Sydney and Melbourne, and Code Camp will be integrated into HP's education partner ecosystem.

It comes weeks after the federal government announced that it would be abolishing the 457 visa program and creating a new temporary skills visa, which does not include some technical skills such as web development on its approved skills list.

The government also announced as part of the federal budget a new foreign worker levy of $1800 a worker a year, which will go towards the new Skilling Australians Fund, which aims to support 300,000 apprenticeships and traineeships in high-demand occupations that rely on skilled migration.

Mr Gracey said while the decision to remove a small number of technical skills from the list could provide some challenges for technology businesses, there was a need to invest in the skill sets of future workers.

"It underpins the reality that if we want the skill set in the future, we have to start investing in it today," he said,

But Code Camp co-founder Ben Levi said that, at a start-up level, it was very difficult to find young employees with the right skills.

"It's difficult to find young UX developers or product managers to work in a start-up. We have a few people in our office on 457 visas because we could not find local developers, however most of the team are Aussies," he said.

"This will definitely make life harder for start-ups when they're looking to hire someone. There just isn't the supply at the moment."