Educational projects for fintech specialists with Uzcard
- Customer
- Uzcard
- IT Provider
- Innotech
- Year of project completion
- 2022
- Project timeline
- February, 2022 - May, 2022
- Project scope
- 291 man-hours
- Goals
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The leading national payment operator of the Republic of Uzbekistan UZCARD needs IT-specialists with international level of knowledge and skills. Innotech Group, one of the main players on the Russian fintech market, has extensive practical experience in solving a variety of tasks. The company’s experts regularly participate in internal and external events to exchange knowledge and improve skills.
The cooperation of Innotec Group and UZCARD allowed organizing in Uzbekistan an educational course for training future staff of the national payment operator, showing the capabilities of Russian software and expertise of IT professionals.
In addition, an additional educational program for young entrepreneurs was held within the gas pedal for scaling fintech start-ups “Startup Bridge”. For UZCARD the success of the participants of the acceleration program will allow to get new customers and improve the services offered.
The uniqueness of the project
The unique free educational IT course “DevOps, OpenShift and how to live with it in fintech” is designed to improve the professional level of CI/CD engineers and DevOps specialists.
During the four weeks, students were trained in the following modules: introduction to microservice architecture, cloud, containerization and orchestration, and system monitoring and observation. In addition, students had the opportunity to do a hands-on project on their own to set up a CI/CD to automatically deploy and run the application in OpenShift.
There was also a
- Difficulty of implementation
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The complexity of the project was the geographical dispersion of students and experts. For example, it was necessary to provide access to the Innotech Group stands for students who were studying at the UZCARD site in Tashkent. For this purpose, a VPN was deployed, and the IT loop was approved by the IS. As a result, it was possible to automate the deployment and provide access to students.
In preparing the training program it was necessary to take into account the mentality of students and language skills. The level of experts in the Uzbek market was studied to customize the program. An optimal entry test was developed to confirm that the student was capable of mastering the curriculum. The dual approval process of the training process by the Innotech Group and UZCARD was also challenging.
During the training process itself, problems were solved with releasing experts from their work tasks, travel to Uzbekistan, checking homework, transporting merchandise, and so on. - Project Description
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The market of information technology in Uzbekistan has been actively developing over the past few years. In 2021, companies working in the field of “IT, Internet, telecom” posted more than 5,500 vacancies on hh.uz, so the number of offers in the market increased by 65% compared to the same period in 2020. But despite the rapid growth of offers, there are still relatively few IT specialists in the region, and those that are available are not always able to cover the needs of companies.
Millennials and zoomers prevail in Uzbekistan — they are much more receptive to innovation. The average age in the country is 29. In Germany, for example, this figure is 44 years, in Russia — 40 years, and in the U.S. — 38 years.
The region has excellent prerequisites for the introduction of digital services in all areas, as the population quickly adapts to new digital products. The share of Internet users in the region is growing quite rapidly — by
25-30% per year.In early 2022 Innotech Group held an IT course for CI/CD engineers and DevOps specialists under UZCARD requirements “DevOps, OpenShift and how to live with it in fintech”. More than 1,200 applications were submitted for the educational event.
Innotech experts selected 26 training participants by means of a technical test. Practical instructors conducted the training, and a month later the best students were already welcomed into the ranks by the team of a key national payment operator. UZCARD reduced the cost of hiring and adapting staff and got employees who from the first day of employment are familiar with the work processes. It is encouraging to note that 12 people received the highest score at the end of the training.
From March to May 2022, the Startup Bridge program took place. Founders of technology projects in areas such as crowdfunding, BNPL, personal finance management services, and B2B SaaS participated. Young entrepreneurs interested in scaling their innovative business to the international market took a special
10-week course, supported by professional mentors and trackers.In a month more than 70 founders of technological companies showed interest in Startup Bridge. Six finalists were chosen and they were given access to the experts of the Innotech Group.
The Startup Bridge program was created together with the gas pedal finalists and included such topics as financial modeling and unit economics, fundraising tools, how to raise capital from strategic investors, product metrics and analytics, the principles of venture funds and others. The classes were held in a hybrid format on the platform of the corporate gas pedal UZCARD.
- Project geography
- Uzbekistan