About Code Your Future

Code Your Future trains dedicated people in poverty to change their lives by getting good jobs in the software industry. We have helped over 300 people get jobs so far, including at companies like Google, Slack, HashiCorp, Thoughtworks, and Capgemini. All of our education is free, and we cover expenses like childcare and transportation to support people in need.

We teach part-time courses using a flipped classroom style - assigning our trainees material to learn and exercises and projects to work on. We meet in-person once a week on Saturdays, and host mentoring sessions in the week, to help people with their learning. Our teaching and mentoring is primarily delivered by volunteers with a diverse set of backgrounds and skills, and our curriculum is all open source.

Your role

We're looking to hire several part-time (16-30 hours per week) paid (£35-55k pro rata) members of staff to focus on helping our community of volunteers to teach better, and providing assessment and feedback to our trainees. You will join a team, together with the Director of Education, motivated by high-quality education delivery and community building to help get people into jobs. You will help new and existing volunteers to work together and deliver effective classes without you needing to be there every week, and assess trainees' progress giving actionable feedback to help them progress.

Your background

Must haves:

• You have written software, either as a job or as a significant hobby.
• You have mentored or taught others and helped them to grow in their skills (ideally in software, but not necessarily).
• You have helped others to become better teachers/mentors.
• You are empathetic and compassionate, and want others to succeed.
• You are comfortable giving constructive, actionable feedback, on people's understanding, code, presentations, and interviews.
• You can easily travel to one of Manchester, Birmingham, or Glasgow. We're looking for one person near each city. We run classes in each of these cities, and you'll need to be able to attend class in your chosen city (ideally ~monthly, but initially weekly).

These optional experiences would make you an exceptionally good fit:

• You've taught software engineering to groups of novices.
• You've started, or helped to run a meet-up group, (un)conference, hackathon, or other community.
• You've reviewed pull requests, and have opinions on what makes for good code review.
• You're proactive and can identify problems as they're happening and drive improvements.
• You have a background or interest in pedagogy/education.

Your responsibilities

• Train volunteers to teach effectively in a flipped-classroom style, and help them grow into leadership roles. You will need to identify what gaps people have, and (in a team) devise ways to fill those gaps.
  • Your first 4-10 weeks will probably involve coming into class most weeks, with a goal of training the community so that you can only come in once a month (and focus on other responsibilities instead).
• Managing volunteers: On-boarding new volunteers, giving tips and feedback to help them be more effective.
• Assess trainees' progress and provide meaningful, actionable feedback, through pair programming sessions and code review.
• Inspire and direct trainees and volunteers to learn and grow together.
• Make realistic plans to get struggling trainees on track, and help them on their journey.
• Improve our curriculum: Notice when things could be better, and work as a team to improve them.
• Identify local employment opportunities for our graduates.
  • Our programme is centred around getting people into jobs. We have people dedicated to finding employment and partnership opportunities, but any support you can provide with your local context is useful! This is a much lower priority responsibility than all of the others.

Our responsibilities to you

• A supportive environment of positive, action-oriented team-mates.
• A community of compassionate individuals from a large range of backgrounds - a small team of dedicated staff, a large team of enthusiastic volunteers, and an even larger community of motivated trainees.
• Clear and actionable ongoing feedback, and openness to getting feedback. We never want anyone to be surprised by how others think things are going.
• Flexibility - we don't mind how or where your work gets done; most of it can be done remotely, and aside from occasional team meetings or attending class, hours can be flexible too.
• Support not to get overwhelmed - supporting people in need can easily lead to burn-out, and we will do all we can to help you set boundaries and disconnect.
• Opportunities to learn and grow - our community have a range of expertise they love to share, our graduates often need to learn new technologies (which we may need to learn to help prepare them), and as staff we strive to improve our pedagogical understanding and practices.