About redAcademy
redAcademy has a clear goal: to give carefully chosen, talented South Africans the opportunity to sprint into their IT careers. By giving Sprinters the opportunity to work in a live environment and gain experience on our clients’ own tech stack, we work closely with industry-leading senior developers and our client partners to ensure that Sprinters have the soft skills and work-readiness to step into a career in the tech industry. Through these strategic partnerships, our Career Sprint is designed to fast-track careers in the real world.
Our vision is a country and industry where there are an abundance of skills and jobs for South Africa’s youth in the tech industry. By blending theory with real-world experience on our client partners’ live projects over the span of a single year, our vision is to support companies to create a work-ready pipeline of software developers, who are equipped with the necessary soft skills and already on board with the company culture.
Our mission is to develop a sustainable pipeline of highly employable and astute software developers to fulfil the local and global IT market recruitment needs. Our mission is to achieve this by transforming the way of learning, by gaining work experience on live client projects and delivering software services in an accelerated environment which addresses the skills gap and talent-acquisition needs of South African businesses.
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redAcademy does this through offering the most relevant software development and real-world skills training to a carefully selected group of high school graduates who are representative of South Africa’s demographics.
Together, we are building the next generation of tech talent for South Africa.
By addressing the skills gap which companies face in South Africa’s tech industry, redAcademy is building the next generation of tech talent for South Africa. Through an innovative approach towards bespoke software development training, experiential learning throughout our Career Sprint, redAcademy is building a sustainable pipeline of tech talent for the future.
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We collaborate with our corporate client partners to ensure our Sprinters gain real-world skills and workplace readiness, to ensure a clear pathway to a software development career upon graduating from redAcademy.
How Do We Operate?
In today’s digital world, technology is being infused into products and solutions across multiple industries, and software development can act as the catalyst to solving both the shortage of scarce software developer skills as well as South Africa’s long-standing youth unemployment problem.
redAcademy’s Career Sprint sees successful candidates enter into a one-year, MICT SETA-accredited programme where the first six months are weighted toward theory, learning career dynamics, learning business structure, and more. The second six month period sees candidates engaging with live development and work on leading enterprise technology solutions for major customers.
Sprinters gain experience in live environments and understand software development in the real world, which enables them to enter the workplace without a skills gap between learned knowledge and experience.
What Sets Us Apart?
redAcademy has been uniquely designed to train the next generation of tech talent on our clients’ live software projects, ensuring their work-readiness and adaptability to enter the ever-changing IT industry. We partner with companies to ensure that candidates build crucial experience on their existing workflows and preferred technology stack, delivering their IT projects ahead of schedule and at the organisations’ expected quality levels, thereby fulfilling the need for critical skills in our tech industry.
Our Sprinter programme helps select young South Africans fast-track their IT careers in a live environment, taught by dedicated software lecturers and guided by senior developers, to create working solutions for real customers, using the most-relevant coding languages.
redAcademy focuses the customisation of our theoretical training to a client’s business and tech stack, thereby offering a unique approach to software development training.
Ultimately, young South Africans get to swap the campus for a meeting room, swap three years of traditional education with one year of experiential learning, swap a qualification with a career, swap theory with practical knowledge, swap seeing with doing, swap waiting with achieving and swap working individually with working in an IT industry network.
Applications for our January 2025 intake of Sprinters for the Software Development Career Sprint are now open
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Jessica Hawkey
Managing Director
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Jessica has a deep passion for providing talented South Africans with the opportunity to sprint into their software developer careers by working closely with professional lecturers, industry-leading senior developers and customers, designed to fast-track careers in the real world. She is committed to changing the way in which learning takes place, with the specific aim of addressing the skills and experience gap, as well as the talent pipeline shortage faced by CTOs and software development teams.
Jessica previously held the position of General Manager of Operations at the Carrick group of companies, a multi-award winning offshore Wealth Management organisation. Having joined Carrick from State Street Poland, in which she was responsible for the launch and training of the Asset Manager Services division in the country.
Gareth Hawkey
Non-Executive Director
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Gareth has over 30 years of experience within the IT industry, and holds an MBA from the University of Cape Town. He has a deep and long standing passion for business and the development of the human capital.
With over 20 years of experience in the retail technology sphere, Gareth brings immense strategic business acumen to redPanda Software team as Group CEO and non-executive chairman of redAcademy. His unique insight has come from diverse and high-level work, including spending 10 years working with a large listed retailer; and a further 10 years on the other side of the desk, supplying retailers with dynamic technology solutions.
Nashid Cassiem
Operations General Manager
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Nashid has a great desire to see young people in South Africa to develop and grow their careers. With experience in working with an international school exchange programme in Scotland, and 10 years in Corporate Retail, he brings great insight to understanding people and process management.
Having coordinated one of TFG’s leading outbound call centres for 2 years, he led a team of 17 team leaders with a total staff complement of 250 staff. Nashid later moved into an Area Manager role overseeing 14 stores across Cape Town for 4 years.
Nashid holds a BA degree in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape.
Emmanuel Madzunye
Senior Software Dev. Lecturer
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Emmanuel holds a Masters degree in Information Technology and has more than 10 years of experience in both academics and the software industry; with extensive experience in software development. Prior to joining redAcademy, Emmanuel held the position of Software Development Team Lead and Lecturer, working closely with students on Software Development projects.
During his career, Emmanuel has worked with students from different backgrounds, in both private and public institutions. This broad experience has further strengthened Emmanuel’s ability to engage a diverse group of students through his adaptive lecturing style. Emmanuel has a strong background in implementing and improving the full systems development cycle (SDLC), with the use of a wide range of technologies and frameworks.
Mahomed Hoosen Goolam Nabee
Technical Mentor
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Mahomed obtained a Higher Certificate in Information Systems Engineering from CTI, Durban followed by a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from Pearson Institute of Higher Education. He is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Science Honors in Information Technology.
Before joining redAcademy, Mahomed worked as a lecturer in the fields of software, hardware, and cybersecurity. He is deeply passionate about imparting knowledge to students and cherishes the opportunity to learn from them. Witnessing students transition from the educational platform to the professional world brings him immense joy.
Angelique Ferguson
Operations Administrator
+27 21 680 0900 | info@redacademy.co.za
Angelique’s experience has worked at a South African software development organisation and business school, in administration and office management. Angelique holds a BCom law degree and has a passion for learning, client interactions and supporting the youth into careers in tech.
