Codecool and Software Development Academy (SDA), two leading Central European EduTech companies, today announced a merger to create one of Europe’s biggest digital skilling and sourcing powerhouses.
The merged company has a presence in eight countries (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, and Albania) and will train 15,000-20,000 individuals annually and work with nearly 400 global and local brands from the Central European region, with key partners including Accenture, Microsoft, Motorola, Morgan Stanley, Ericsson and Vodafone.
With over 300 employees, 17 digital reskilling pathways, and a network of 1,600 mentors, the merged company offers skilling, upskilling, and reskilling to individuals, companies and governments. For the public sector, Codecool and SDA have undertaken two successful reskilling programs: 10,000 ICT specialists in Albania and 600 engineers in Hungary. The merged company will also continue to encourage and support women in ICT through different programs.
“There is a global battle for digital talent, especially coders and programmers, so our main aim remains to provide high-quality digital skilling for employees and employers – but on a much larger scale,” said Michał Mysiak, CEO of SDA, who will lead the merged company as the CEO. “We believe that the combination of Codecool and SDA – with distinct regional and category strengths – will boost the skills level of Central Europeans who are hungry to learn and will be pivotal to the digital transformation of Europe and beyond.”
“This is an exciting new chapter for both companies where we create a real powerhouse for digitalization,” said József Boda, CEO of Codecool. “Through our consolidated digital skilling programs, we continue to serve the needs of individuals, companies and governments. Graduates from our courses are in high demand, especially as Western European and US organizations look to outsource or find additional talent while lowering costs.”
Gaining digital skills is a global requirement and the merged company can help the EU and the UK to upskill workers or fill recruitment gaps, especially as it has a 50% annual growth rate in student enrolment. Additionally, more and more companies will have need for digital reskilling programs, adding new, future-proof knowledge to their existing workforces. Today, the newly merged entity is able to support both upskilling and reskilling on a large scale.
The EU is currently struggling with a shortfall of approximately 1.8 million ICT experts, with both missing skills and under-qualification. While the pandemic led to increased demand for cyber skills – there is still a cybersecurity workforce gap of more than 2.72 million positions globally. In the UK, tech job opportunities have hit a ten year high as the demand for skilled workers outgrows the level of digital skills available.
Furthermore, an important goal under the European Commission’s Digital Decade program is to employ 20 million ICT specialists by 2030, with an equal proportion of men and women. To reach this objective, €161 billion will be allocated to innovation and digitalization of EU markets according to the European recovery plan. For instance, Germany will spend €13.3 billion on digital transformation, for France this will be close to €8 billion and €48 billion for Italy. There will be significant resources for Central European countries: for example in Poland 21.3% of the total €35.4 billion recovery fund, so more than €7 billion will be spent on digital transformation alone, in Romania, this is approximately €6 billion while Austria will spend around €1,8 billion.
This European vision can only be achieved with strong sectoral reskilling players, like the merged Codecool and SDA company, that is focusing on the biggest digital talent pool on the continent – the Central European region. In these countries, the population’s interest in getting future-proof, well-paying digital jobs is the highest within the EU.
Michał Mysiak added: “To encourage even more investors to the region there is a need to provide highly skilled ICT professionals in a fast track mode and the merged company is an answer to this need as well as a unique chance for the region to become an emerging ICT service center on a global scale.”
The two companies will keep using their strong consumer brands in their local markets as Codecool and SDA in the near future and will come up with new digital skilling training reflecting the rapidly changing technological environment. Alongside the current eight countries, the merged company will keep expanding into new geographic territories, strengthening its top position in the digital skills training sector.
Codecool is a Budapest based, privately founded, seven-year-old company, present in four countries (HU-PL-RO-AT), with close to 150 employees, having more than 2,000 graduates already, and 300+ corporate partners.
Software Development Academy (SDA) is a Gdynia (Poland) based, privately founded, seven-year-old company present in six countries (PL-RO-EE-CZ-SK-AL), close to 150 employees, having more than 15,000 graduates already, and 100+ corporate partners.
