Oracle Academy and UKOUG - a great team

Back in January I wrote about the Oracle Academy coming to the UK, or specifically coming to Oracle Scotland.

At the OUG Conference last week the Director responsible for this initiative Caroline Stuart gave us an update on how this initiative is working and I was very excited by it. I want to encourage people into IT careers, I think Oracle is a great discipline to work with.

I often say I am not particularly worried about the 'Women in IT' question but just last week before this update, I was speaking with Sarah Lamb founder of GirlGeekDinners about how to encourage more girls into IT initially and think this program which covers not just university by which time the inequality has already started but also colleges and especially 6th Forms, has the opportunity to help address the balance.

So the Oracle Academy in Scotland has signed up 150 instructors to qualify to teach Database Design and Programming with SQL and another 50 for Java Fundamentals. Of these 200, who have almost completed their 10 week virtual training, 98 are from the UK, the rest from the wider EMEA. Their next step is a weeks bootcamp in Scotland next month.

This is fantastic, well done Oracle I know our next generation of IT students will benefit, but I want to reach out to them from the user group, help them see how what they learn is used and the types of careers people using these skills have gone on to develop.

So working with Oracle, we will talk to these Oracle Academy delegates at the start of their bootcamp, tell them about UKOUG and invite them each to attend a day at our annual conference in Birmingham in December. We will also work out a way of them being able to bring their students at cost price to experience the world they will by then have started to learn about.

I'm also looking at how we can link up our partner members with these educators, so they can share their expectations and make sure the students who ultimately benefit from this Oracle Academy initiative get the best possible start in their careers. Perhaps in years to come they like me will be able to say 'I love my job'.