Kainos Group is a UK-based provider of Digital Services and Digital Platforms. Operating across eight offices in Europe and the USA, the Group’s Digital Services include full lifecycle development and support of customised Digital Services for government and commercial customers.
Background
Kainos is also the largest boutique partner for Workday Inc. in Europe. With around 1,000 employees, the Group’s Digital Platforms comprise specialised digital products in the mobile healthcare and automated testing areas.
What Kainos did
The Kainos Tech Outreach Programme was established in 2014 both to focus the company’s CSR strategy and to support the Kainos vision; to enable outstanding people to create digital solutions that have a positive impact on people’s lives. With 90% of jobs requiring digital skills and a digital skills gap costing around 6.3 billion per year, Kainos recognises its unique position to help tackle this problem. It is within this context that the Tech Outreach programme was developed and its key aim is to harness Kainos employee’s passion to radically inspire, enthuse, and educate people as the future of the digital economy.
The Tech Outreach programme achieves its aim by inspiring and educating young people to improve their skills, by empowering teachers to bring digital literacy into the classroom, by breaking down economic barriers to create equality of opportunity for young people, by encouraging staff to get involved and, finally, by influencing policy makers to help make IT education better.
Key to the Tech Outreach Programme is the partnership and collaborative approach taken by Kainos which is spearheaded by its Board and led by a full-time Tech Outreach Programme Manager. The Tech Outreach Programme consists of five main partnerships; STEM programme with Prince’s Trust, weekly code club sessions or one-off Lego league sessions with primary schools, two week code camp with Queen’s University Belfast, curriculum collaboration/teacher training with CCEA, and the annual BelTech EDU one-day tech conference.
Impacts and Outcomes
£100,000 and 1000 employee hours donated to Tech Outreach Programme
900 young people helped through Prince’s Trust Programme
Over 40 schools engaged in Code Club
1,500 students attended BelTech Conference to date
50 teachers trained through CCEA partnership
For more information, please email: e.waring@kainos.com