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Quite a few tech companies in Jordan are looking for new hires, particularly in the field of web development, according to a recent survey. Some of these companies have partnered up with a small group of Jordanian developers, whom are now leading an educational initiative they’re calling “TOP Academy”, a 6-week long web development course in Amman.

The teachers of the courses will include developers who have dealt with thousands of issues, and have presented their platforms to millions (including senior developers from Bayt.com). Participating students will be taught basic programming fundamentals that are focused on PHP, HTML/CSS, databases, APIs, how to integrate them, etc…

That’s a lot of material to learn in 6 weeks. However, there will be training, multiple hackathons, and even peer-to-peer programming involved. A graduating student will understand the essentials, and have the potential and curiosity to learn new technologies, instead of being limited to just 1 or 2 programming languages.

Survey Results on Job Openings for Web Development in Jordan

TOP Academy distributed a survey to Tech companies in Jordan to understand the market needs, the results showed that web development is the most demanded skill in the workplace. The findings of the survey also showed that Jordanian companies aren’t fully satisfied with the quality of web developers both in Jordan and in the region. Here are the main findings in the survey:

• 87% of companies that participated are hiring web developers

• 53% of demanded technology was PHP, and HTML/CSS, followed by Javascript and databases.

We talked with Firas Steitiyeh, Managing Director of TOP (The Online Project) who commented on the survey findings “While it’s easier to teach people how to use Python or Ruby on Rails, the syntax is easier for them to learn than PHP. However, the market is asking for something else, so there’s no reason to create supply for something that has no demand.”

How Taking This Course Can Translate to a Job and Career

After the course is completed, Steitiyeh promised TOP will match students with employers. There’s no financial contribution, the Tech companies involved are excited to screen and interview graduates of this course.

Steitiyeh said “Our reputation as having a huge supply of developers in Jordan doesn’t capture the clear reality of the situation. Many developers count on their university major in ‘computer science’, which does not fully arm these developers with the necessary skills to get a job in today’s tech companies. There are many computer scientists, but not many developers. We believe this is the case in most Arab countries.”

He then mentioned that 2 developers left his team the past year, and he managed to find them jobs in less than a week, “because good developers are that rare.” he says. “We need accelerators not just for entrepreneurs and companies, but also for people, we need to accelerate people skills.”

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