Infinum Academy in Croatia

The Academy’s Infinum programme of IT courses is organised at the level of the company’s regional offices (in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Podgorica and Skopje). These are programming and application development courses in different programming languages, as well as interface design courses. They are carried out by the availability of mentors and trainers, who are among the largest number of senior developers Infinuma, whose time is allocated by the requirements of the tasks on which they work daily.

Practical work, one-on-one

Coding courses last five weeks and are carried out in a hybrid way – both face-to-face and online, with most participants taking part in face-to-face attendance, by going to the company’s offices.

The Academy’s Infinum Academy was launched in 2015, when the company in the process of recruiting new staff noted some differences in the knowledge of the candidates at that time about the knowledge and skills used in the company’s projects. As technological progress is taking place at a rapid pace, the theoretical knowledge students gained at university was not adapted to the processes and tools used in contemporary development.

Indeed, technical faculties in Croatia and other countries of our region provide students with basic technological and objective programming skills, while Infinum courses are based on practical knowledge and work on real projects carried out by the company for its clients. “This is the highest value of the College’s Infinum. In addition, one-to-one is done. Each student has a dedicated mentor,” says Una Mihajlović, director of the Infinum Academy.

Business culture and new technologies

The duration of coding courses is five weeks (the first four weeks take place twice, most frequently on Mondays and Thursdays, the last week being the consultation and completion of the trainees’ assignments at the College) and they are carried out in a hybrid way – both in person and online – with most participants taking part in person, attending classes at the offices of Infinum. “It is up to students to familiarise themselves with the culture of work in IT, not just to attend lectures,” says Una Mihajlović.

At the beginning of the Academy, the content focused on mobile application development technologies, iOS and Android, but soon the programme was expanded with design courses, as well as frontend and backend development of web apps. A large number of new courses such as.NET, flutter, DevOps and WordPress were added last year, and as of this autumn, students will also be able to enrol in the QA course “The basis is the same, and the new technical changes that are taking place in the latest versions of the tools we use on our projects and entirely new courses,” says Una Mihajlović.

For students – and all others

Each student has to pass the admission test, but “if you have completed the second year of university, master the objective programming, the basis of Gita, you understand the basic algorithms and the structure of computer science data, this should be a sufficient pre-knowledge. Our website describes in detail the knowledge that every candidate wishing to take the admission test must have, and there is a list of books we recommend", says Una Mihajlović, director of the Infinum of the Academy. 

Until last year, the Infinum Academy was aimed exclusively at students and has since last year been open to all those who want to acquire state-of-the-art IT knowledge and thus become more personally competitive in the European Union market and beyond.

So far, over the past eight years, 470 people have completed the Infinum Academy. Around 100 remained working in Infinum – some of them became mentors at the Academy and several of them reached management functions in the company. “A good part of the alumni Infinum of the Academy has been employed by competing IT companies in Croatia but also in other countries, which further confirms the value of our education,” says Una Mihajlović.

New platform, global education

A new phase of development of the College’s Infinum programme consists of its organisational extension to sister companies, Productive and Porsche Digital Croatia, which now use the Infinum training platform and build on it to become a product that will also be offered to customers in the future. “Last year, for the first time, we had a flutter course and we found that this type of education is even a very rare commodity globally. Moreover, we found that there was a need for tailor-made training for specific clients,’ says Una.

Why is it good practice?

Infinum expands its business, the company intends to open several more offices in various countries, where the Infinum Academy will also be available free of charge to local people. The next step, i.e. Una Mihajlović, for the time being, is the offer made by Infinum’s educational platform, both outside the company’s office and outside the branches in the countries where Infinum operates. The aim is to make this a self-contained, globally available education. It is a large-scale IT online curriculum that would be charged and offered to everyone in the world.

@Infinum