The Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) of Egypt's Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) has launched ‘Next Coders' programme to build and develop students' coding and computer programming skills. The TIEC offers secondary-school first-year students the training course gratis with a nanodegree certificate on ‘Learn to Code' presented by Udacity. The programme entails providing training in a number of areas including the basics of programming through HTML, CSS, and Python-possible programming paths with our final project selection-and the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm through Python. ‘Next Coders' programme is part of the ‘Next Technology Leaders (NTL)' presidential initiative which aims to build the capacity of young calibres with the latest information, communications, and electronic technologies. The ‘Next Coders' programme also aims to create a pool of talented youth capable of keeping up with modern developments, equipped with the skills required by the labour market, and qualified to work according to modern career paths in high-tech areas. The programme targets training 1,200 students in phase one, out of 5,000 students over the period 2018-2019. Furthermore, the programme offers a cash prize worth EGP 1,000 for each student after successfully finishing the three-month course, in addition to qualifying them to join a programming league competition held nation-wide. Moreover, the ‘Next Coders' programme reflects the keenness of the ministry of communications and information technology (MCIT) to integrate IT and programming fundamentals in all educational stages where the government is investing heavily in order to build a generation equipped with the needed digital skills, and the ability to think and problem-solve like a programmer. Egypt offers an abundance of talent ideally suited to IT and business process outsourcing. Over 35 universities and 100 institutes introduce 500,000 annual graduates, of which 220,000 are able to provide IT services and 50,000 enjoy an IT-related skillset. The multilingual talent pool the country enjoys makes it a hub and an ideal location for serving offshore operations with over 20 languages across more than 100 countries.
