Introduction

SLASSCOM Bootcamp Curriculum is intended to be used as a guidance by educational and vocational institutes in teaching ICT.

Which career qualification?: This is for students passionate in a software development related career. Intended for diploma level qualifications to pursue an entry level job.
Recommended duration?: Through a short (~6 months) intensive course.
Is this free to use?: This is an open source curriculum under Creative Commons license - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You are free to use this for commercial, non-commercial use under the terms of the license.
Who are behind this?: SLASSCOM (together with the industry professionals) expects to maintain this up-to-date and relevant to reflect the entry level skill demands in the Industry. YOULEAD (https://www.youlead.lk/) has provided guidance and financial support in developing this curriculum.

Summary of the modules

Module	Details
Computational Thinking	View Topics
Working with Data	View Topics
Web Application Development	View Topics
Mobile Application Development	View Topics
IT Industrial Knowledge	View Topics
Entrepreneurial Mindset	View Topics
Life Skills for 21st Century	View Topics

Problem overview

Skills development and capacity building are vital in achieving the SLASSCOM Vision 2022 of USD 5 billion in revenue, 200,000 jobs, and 1000 startups.

The National IT-BPM workforce survey 2019, conducted by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), reveals that the IT-BPM workforce’s annual shortage is 12,140. The local universities produce only 9,076 graduates a year, and the annual demand stands at 21,216. This supply-demand gap is shown to keep growing with the industry’s expansion and has become a significant bottleneck impacting the growth of the sector.

Although there are tens of thousands of students learning ICT related subjects and vocational and other diploma courses, their employability in the software export industry is low. Unemployability is mainly due to the outdated and non-relevant curriculums and poor quality education standards.

Why a new curriculum

There are some different ICT diploma curriculums in-use by public and private educational institutes. As per SLASSCOM’s observation, most of these are outdated and do not reflect the skills required by the industry. This curriculum will be kept up-to-date by the industry and freely available for any institute to use as guidance to influence their curriculums.

This curriculum is not a comprehensive lesson plan to cover all the skills in-use in the industry. Instead, it is a limited scope good enough for a student to find an entry-level job opportunity as a developer.

In developing this, we have adapted some structural elements of TRACE re:start curriculum, but the content of the lessons are developed independently by contributors from the industry.

Underline principles

This curriculum is built based on the following ground principles. If you wish to become a contributor, it is essential to understand and adhere to these principles.

Applicability before theory: A common mistake of most curriculums is that they teach a lot of theory to students before they understand how and when to apply such. This curriculum is built in a way students experience and understand the usage first so that they appreciate the theory when learned later. For example, students should use 'sorting' practically before learning to write a 'bubble sort' algorithm.
Hands-on teaching: Rather than long presentation slides and descriptions, the lecturer should show/write 'real code' and explain the concepts to students.
Continuous evaluations: Student evaluation should be continuous and shouldn't happen at a final examination. Use interactive, gamified tools (such as Kahoot) to do fast and frequent evaluations.
Focus on essentials: If the curriculum is shallow and broad, students may learn many things but won't master any. If you keep the curriculum narrow and deep, students will learn a limited scope well enough to make practical use of it. Since this curriculum is for six months and entry levels, we propose focusing on a few things and teach them well for a student to find an entry-level job.
Pair lecturing: Pair a professional from the industry with the lecturer when delivering the lessons. Lesson should take a discussion format between the lecturer and professional allowing students to participate by asking questions.

How to contribute

This repository is maintained as a community effort in the industry. If you like to contribute, please go through the following link:

Guide for contributors