Filip Misovski is a product executive working for 16 years at SAP, Germany and a supporter of Macedonia2025. At the Macedonia Economic Summit, Filip spoke on the panel titled “Transforming Macedonia into a hub for smart industries” where he noted that there is a solid talent base in the region that can be part of the next generation opportunities in the IT sector. To support the development of this talent pool, Filip with the support of SAP, organized a digital boot camp – a first of its kind ever to take place in Macedonia earlier this year.  And the boot camp has been successful.

All of the materials for the students, such as videos, exercises, engineering and development tools were prepared by SAP and could be accessed online by the 15 participants applied for the boot camp. Filip himself coached the participants through the process, introduced them to the curriculum and was available to answer any questions. Each week, there was a live check-point through Skype group session in order to summarize what has been learned during that week and to prepare the material and learning points for the next week. This way, the boot camp covered two big engineering areas for in-memory database and cloud computing. In each area, there were 4 dedicated classes which contained two to three months’ worth of learning material.

Seven participants were able to persist to the end and are at the moment working on SAP-related projects in different organizations. According to Filip, those who gave up could not really take the weight of the material or dedicate the necessary time and focus on learning.  This, says Filip, is a great way for engineers to test and challenge themselves while paving the road for a more successful career. An interesting fact about the boot camp is that half of the participants were female which speaks about an equal distribution of engineers in Macedonia.  It’s absolutely a positive thing to maintain diversity leading to more successful projects.

Following the pilot boot camp, the question is what’s next? SAP is continuing to invest in latest and greatest courses and material for technology and solutions that 300,000 customers use globally.   More engineers and product specialists will need to be educated and ready in the market, so we are looking at a second boot camp that will be focused on technical / engineering as well as a business / consulting track.

Macedonia2025 invites all people in the IT and MBA sphere to prepare themselves for a good challenge and anticipate the Wave 2 boot camp.  We will let everyone know through our social media pages, so stay connected!