by Egbert v. Frankenberg
In the age of online communication, service driven industries can be anywhere on the planet. No longer are tangible products the only commodity that is “Made in Elsewhere”. BPO industries in India, Eastern Europe and many other developing countries have benefited from the global technological advancements in communication and allowed them to leap frog into the information age and offer call centers and software development services to name just a top few.
Jamaica is among the leading nations in the Caribbean region for investing in its BPO sector. However, sooner rather than later won’t the close proximity to North America and accent free native English be the only attributes of a Unique Competitive Advantage. Software engineers, Web developers, App developers all will be required to perform and outperform globally in the BPO market. Hence the question:
Are Caribbean Developers of World Class?
Soon this will become the question everyone is going to ask when it comes to the topic of “product extension” beyond Call Centers in the BPO sector across the Caribbean.
Over the next couple weeks we will release specifically designed tests from Hackerrank.com to find out what the average skill levels are in the Caribbean. The tests will increase in difficulty each time and will range from HTML, CSS, iOS, Android, Java, Database Systems, Ruby, Node.JS, Python and many more. Each test needs to be completed within 60 minutes.
According to an article by TechCrunch the test platform “Hackerrank.com…
… Makes Technical Recruitment More Transparent.
Major IT businesses from the Valley have started to make their hiring decisions of candidates based on successful test submissions rather than the merits of a Masters Degree from MIT or Stanford. This is what FORTUNE had to say:
Why your next job search may involve solving online puzzles
What We Hope To Achieve.
Our aim is to create a detailed map of the Caribbean software development landscape and possibly establish if there is a pattern as to what skills are predominant and more importantly which skills are lacking across the Caribbean.
We hope that the results will be able to assist educational institutions to re-evaluate their syllabi to ensure the coming generations are prepared for the international competition and opportunities alike.
Once we have all tests completed we will share the results online and disclose the top 5 developers from the entire Caribbean that entered the tests.
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Here is the link to the first Test, which is all about HTML and Web Development.
HTML TEST v1.0
by Egbert v. Frankenberg is the CEO at Knightfox App Design Ltd.
