Hassan recalls telling her that he needed six months to learn how to run a tech-training company on the model that she was proposing and to wind down his other businesses. And she said he would need to have his first paying customer within that same six months.
Hassan, his brother and their friend Salad built a network, took trainings and made connections with companies, eventually including Microsoft, which became a partner in the program.
“We had our first client in four months,” Hassan says with a laugh. It was a major Norwegian bank that committed to taking a graduate of the program for a one-year contract.
Henriette Dolven is the education lead for Microsoft Norway, and she is one of the company’s leaders who supported the Amesto Aces program.
Seven Norwegian labor and trade organizations for the tech industry collaborated on a study on the need for tech labor skills in the country by 2030, she says. “It confirmed we needed 40,000 people for tech jobs by 2030, and it was clear there aren’t enough tech graduates to fill those positions,” she says.
Dolven said she and her colleagues had been looking for partners to help fill that labor gap when they heard about Amesto Aces.
She and her colleagues began meeting with Hassan and the other leaders of Aces to see how Microsoft could help.
“The first skilling program was on cybersecurity, and it was all based on Microsoft Learnso the content was there,” she recalls. “But the Amesto Aces used their skills to give it structure, put the different kinds of learning modules together and combine with the social skilling they provide.”
In addition to training participants in particular kinds of developing and programming, Amesto Aces trains its students in “soft skills” – how to present themselves for work and how to be a good employee.
“For me it’s kind of building upon the Microsoft values of inclusiveness – being a part of something meaningful,” Dolven says.
Spandow says the program echoes the roots of the Amesto Group, which in its earliest version was founded by her grandmother after World War II, when she created a company that provided secretarial services to companies that were short on employees – introducing women to the labor force while filling a labor gap. “In a way Amesto Aces brings it full circle,” she says.
Since its beginning, the training program has had 61 participants, and 36 have completed all certifications. Seven are completing the course now, she says. The idea is that Amesto Aces outsources their labor as contractors for one year with the hope that the company will then hire them full time.
Twelve other participants have gotten full-time jobs after fulfilling their contracts, she says. Six have found other IT jobs while doing the course, and nine have found non-IT jobs.
According to Hassan, nine participants were women, and 29 had immigrant backgrounds.
The goal is to expand the program to other Norwegian cities and eventually to the other Nordic countries, Spandow says.
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