DEVOPSdigest

As part of its strategic efforts to grow the Progress talent pool and global developer community, Progress launched Progress Academy, an education program to help new developers quickly acquire the appropriate skills to leverage Progress OpenEdge for enterprise-class application development.

According to Gartner, "Digital business is impacting how CIOs develop their organizations. CIOs must enhance IT workforce skills and competencies to thrive in the digital world. This initiative offers CIOs and IT leaders the guidance to renew talent management processes and to grow IT skills and competencies."

Based on feedback from customers and partners looking to address the IT skills gap, coupled with the exponential growth in the digital economy and the recent explosion of new technologies including mobile, cloud and big data, Progress established Progress Academy as an educational resource for students looking to acquire the skills necessary to develop applications on the Progress OpenEdge platform. Progress OpenEdge is a complete development platform to build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, mobile device and cloud. It currently powers more than 6,000 apps, is deployed in 50,000 businesses and is used by more than 4 million end-users worldwide.

Progress Academy students will learn everything a new developer requires to design, build and test business applications using the Progress OpenEdge platform.

The four-week course will run 3-4 times per year in central locations in North America and Europe, and real-world senior consultants and developers will teach sessions. Students will have access to the Progress OpenEdge Developer Kit: Classroom Edition, a downloadable application development toolkit, as well as OpenEdge Developer Studio. In addition, the plethora of educational resources and support from the online forum, Progress Community, will be available to students.

"According to feedback we've received from our customers and partners, well-trained, highly qualified Progress OpenEdge developers are in demand," said Jerry Rulli, Chief Operating Officer, Progress. "Affordable and easy access to training is an important element in our efforts to help our global user community use, grow and thrive with Progress products. That's why we are excited to offer Progress Academy to our customers and partners. Our goal is to make the process of learning and using Progress products as fast, affordable and frictionless as possible."