30. Nov 2021Insight

What is GoodRequest Academy and how was created

Education is one of the best ways to bring value back to the community while moving forward as an individual, team or company. That is why, in addition to working with schools, supporting organizations or leading workshops, we have established the GoodRequest Academy. I talked about it's story with Andrej Hrabovský in the Silná Káva podcast.

Marek ŠpalekCTO

How did GoodRequest Academy started?

GoodRequest was established 8 years ago, which is a quite a long time in the field of IT. We were already involved in the development of mobile applications at that time, but since "normal dumb" mobile phones were available as standard at that time, there were not so many developers. As we were a young start-up company, we did not have the resources to reach out to foreign developers, so we reached out to the students and started educating our own developers. We did the first academy in cooperation with the University of Žilina. It took the form of lectures and workshops, where we taught students to develop mobile apps, then on iOS and Windows Phone platforms.

On the next academies, we cooperated with Azet, which, like us, is a Žilina company and we solved similar problems. We were looking for developers and since informatics is evolving very fast and the mobile world is twice as fast, schools cannot react flexibly. For example, just approving subjects and scripts takes a very long time and we wanted a more flexible solution. That's why we started educating people on our own. Later, we switched to forms, where we found already experienced programmers and helped them move to mobile development.

Currently, GoodRequest Academy is mainly dedicated to students. These are simpler assignments for a students who can solve them in a few days or weeks and receive a reward. At least each participant will receive packages with material prizes or a gift, and the best one will receive a financial reward and in some cases an internship offer and space to develop their talent within our company.

What was the reason for founding the Academy?

In addition to capacity needs in the beginning, it's also about transferring knowledge back to the community. Although it doesn't seem like it, it requires a lot of energy, time and preparation. That's why we changed the form. If a small problem or space for innovation arises in our company and we do not manage to solve it on our own, we will process it into the assignment and thus provide space for the academy participants to try out a real-life task. So far, participants have a free hand in choosing technologies, so they can solve the task in an environment where they feel most comfortable, and then we can help them further.

Another "problem" is that schools give students a lot of theoretical foundations and prepare them in many ways, but we are so specifically oriented that we need to give individuals extra space to specialize and gain experience in a particular field. For example, when it comes to recent graduates, we want to give them knowledge that they have not yet acquired at school. The advantage of our assignments is that they put the participants into practice and show them if it works in life.

How can you join GoodRequest Academy?

Assignments arise situationally on the basis of real problems that we solve in GR. We always inform about the new assignment through our communication channels, so it is ideal to follow our social networks (you can find us on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn) or subscribe to our newsletter. Of course, you can also find the assignment on our website in the GoodRequest Academy section, where you will also find older assignments and thus create an idea of what awaits you. When you find an assignment that interests you, all you have to do is log in, work out the assignment and wait for the evaluation🏅.