Enspiral Dev Academy offers scholarships to Māori & Pasifika

Up-and-coming web developers now have the chance to grab one of 23 scholarships at Enspiral Dev Academy for its full stack web development programme.

The Academy first runs a 9-18 week online preparation module part-time from home, before undergoing a 9-week intensive in-class course in either Auckland or Wellington.

The Academy says students are taught by professional developers and can begin with almost no experience. After completion, they leave with the fundamentals of software development needed to be employed as junior developers.

21 of those scholarships are being offered in conjunction with MBIE Te Puni Kōkiri, which will be for Māori who are interested in becoming web developers. These scholarships are worth $7,000 each, which reduces course costs to $3500.

The other two scholarships, worth $10,000 each, are available for Pasifika who are interested. This reduces course fees to $500.

"Students learn JavaScript, React and Redux, working from the front end to the back end and looking at everything from testing to databases," Enspiral Dev Academy explains.

"They work in iterative agile loops and learn the fundamentals of working in a development environment: communication, teamwork and feedback. This gives them the ability to learn any programming language rapidly and hit the ground running in a developer job, contributing usefully to a team straight away.

According to the Academy, New Zealand needs many more people from underrepresented groups such as women, Māori, and Pasifika working in the tech field.

Founders Joshua Vial and Rohan Wakefield say their mission is to improve tech to make it New Zealand's top export. They believe it will enrich the country, utilise innovation, and protect the environment from agriculture.

The Academy says it tries to achieve this by offering an automatic $500 discount for anyone who is from an underrepresented group.

It also designed the learning curriculum with tech employers and it is improved in weekly cycles to that it is teaching skills that the industry is looking for right now.

"Dev Academy campus doubles as a startup coworking and events space so students can meet companies looking for developers. The course also ends with a special careers week which prepares students for networking and job hunting in the technical world. As a result, 86% of students who graduated over four months ago have work in web development.

Enspiral Dev Academy also recently closed applications for women in tech, in conjunction with Skills.org, in which they offered eight $9000 scholarships.