23 Nov Connecting business and youth: promoting new digital skills in the No-Code Challenge

Following the efforts done to promote youth entrepreneurship and foster youth insertion in the labour market, on 8th of November 2023 the team of FUNDECYT-PCTEX together with Cocobrand, the youth-led company responsible for the creation of the RAISE Youth Digital Toolbox, organized a hackathon with the students of the Superior Vocational Training Programme in Coding and Computer Science.

During this hackathon, aptly named “No-Code Challenge”, young participants were encouraged to use the digital tools available in the RAISE Youth Digital Toolbox, the web-app designed within the framework of the RAISE Youth project following the No-Code philosophy, to solve a series of challenges proposed by actual businesses that needed digital solutions to real problems that they face in a day-to-day basis. By dividing the 24 participants in different groups and making them compete with each other and come up with different and innovative ideas, the participants were able to provide real and replicable solutions, albeit in the form a draft presentation, to those challenges presented by the businesses that participated in the event.

According to the opinions and data gathered by the team of FUNDECYT-PCTEX, both of the businesses that attended the hackathon, Impulsa Dirección de Proyectos and Travelsia, and the attendees expressed their interest into keep working with each other. Some of the participants even expressed their willingness to start their own business following this No-Code approach and start small technical consultancy agencies aimed to solve the digital needs of business inside and outside of Extremadura, combining their own expertise with the potentiality of No-Code tools and transversal profiles.

From FUNDECYT-PCTEX and in liaison with several training institutions with itineraries related to coding and software developing, we hope that this activity serves as the baseline for the development of a No-Code community in Extremadura, that will establish the region as a referent in the sector and become a hotspot for the exchange of knowledge and talent in this new and growing digital field of work.