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Novosco Summer Camp to develop IT skills of the future
Two of Northern Ireland’s most innovative companies have joined together with Belfast Metropolitan College to offer budding IT engineers the chance to develop their skills.
Novosco Cloud Camp, which is organised by Novosco and supported by Almac, will run at Belfast Met’s Titanic Quarter Campus between 7th and 11th August 2017.
Free of charge and open to students over the age of 16 (on 7th August 2017) at schools and colleges across Northern Ireland, it will provide hands-on IT infrastructure experience, as well as a fun learning environment.
Professional IT engineers and Belfast Met lecturers will facilitate the camp, which will also involve a tour of Novosco’s Catalyst Inc headquarters to allow students to see a world-class managed cloud company in action.
In addition to free registration, all participants will be provided with a free Raspberry Pi computer to keep, as well as a £5 lunch voucher per day.
The camp will help students develop their skills in areas including Python programming, hardware and operating systems, and cloud technologies, such as creating a virtual server and basic HTML programming.
Novosco Managing Director, Patrick McAliskey, said: “We were overwhelmed with the interest in last year’s inaugural Novosco Cloud Camp, in partnership with Almac, and we anticipate even stronger interest this year. We are delighted to be working with Almac and Belfast Met to help deliver the camp again, which we see as an invaluable initiative for skills development in Northern Ireland. As a fast-growing managed cloud company, we are very aware of the need to encourage more of our young people to choose IT, and we believe that there is no better career than IT infrastructure.”
Andrew Hillis, group head of information services at Almac commented, “As a global company providing unique services, demand from clients all over the world continues to grow. IT plays an incredibly important role in delivering our global operations and as such we offer a vast range of career opportunities within Almac to people with these skills. The Cloud Camp is an excellent way of stimulating interest in IT infrastructure amongst young people and we look forward to working with Novosco to encourage potential future employees.”
Belfast Met’s Principal and CEO, Marie-Thérèse McGivern, said: “We are delighted to be hosting the Novosco Cloud Camp at our state-of-the-art Titanic Quarter campus this summer. We look forward to welcoming young people to the College where they will gain hands-on experience from our lecturers and get the opportunity to utilise the top class facilities at our campus. This experience will no doubt grow their interest in this area and help them succeed in their future careers.
Novosco is a managed cloud provider with clients in the public, private and voluntary sectors across the UK and Ireland, including Premiership football teams, police forces, some of the UK’s largest health trusts and many of Northern Ireland’s top companies.
Novosco employs almost 150 people, mainly in Belfast. Last year it acquired English specialist IT security solutions and managed services expert NetDef, further extending its presence in the GB market.
Novosco, which is continuing to recruit for high-value roles in Belfast, recently invested over £1million to more-than-double its space in the city, from 5,000 sq ft to over 11,000 sq ft. Located in the new Concourse 3 building at Catalyst, Novosco’s impressive new headquarters includes state-of-the-art offices, a gym, a library, a coffee dock, and a virtual reality room.