This might be your first real introduction to what we at Umuzi are all about. All this stuff will be covered in detail in one of our introductry conversations, so this page will be brief.
Umuzi’s mission is to help high potential young people access high value digital careers.
In order to do this we have worked with corporate partners to invest in young people and support their career journeys.
There are a few phases of the Umuzi recruit user journey. What’s a recruit? Keep reading and you’ll find out.
Here are all the phases to the journey
You have already done this. But here’s a fun fact: Did you know that our applicant portal and process was mostly built by our own Umuzi recruits? Cool hey?
In the background, we mark your tests and figure out who might be able to make it with us. If we think you have potential then we invite you to the next phase.
You are here.
We make decisions about who is in and who is out in our bootcamp. Now is a good time to prepare yourself.
We’ve found that our recruits do best when they are able to:
By properly preparing yourself for our bootcamp, you’ll show us who you are.
We’ve given you quite a lot of stuff to do. Do your best, we don’t think everyone will get through all of it. All we are asking for here is your best work.
This is the next step for you.
This is a 2 week course that will teach you some solid skills.
The bootcamp will be run using our own custom built learning platform. There will be a bit of a learning curve and you’ll probably get confused, but there will be staff on hand to help you out if you get stuck. Please make sure you ask questions when you get stuck!
During the bootcamp you’ll have a bit of work to do, and you’ll have a few interviews and tests with different people.
PLEASE NOTE: the bootcamp should be treated like a full time job! Spend at least a full workday on your course every single day!
It is your responsibility to:
If you sucessfully complete our bootcamp then you’ll get a nationally recognised certificate! This is pretty cool if you ask me, even if you don’t get into Umuzi you can put this on your CV. This is because we want to make sure that our bootcamp is useful for you, even if you don’t get into Umuzi.
Once bootcamp is finished, Umuzi staff members (and our trusty robots) will make a final selection of who gets into our program. Those people will be offered 1 year contracts with us and will be referred to as “recruits”. Here are a few details:
Once you’ve signed your contract, you’ll be an Umuzi recruit.
The next phase is learning. You’ll be familiar with how we do things from going through our bootcamp. We’ll give you a whole lot of learning to do, and lots of projects and assessments to hone your skillz.
You’ll be expected to work like a real professional. You will be immersed in modern agile development practices from day 1. You’ll learn hard skills, interact with your peers and overcome challenges you never thought you could.
At the end of this you’ll have an NQF level 5 National Certificate in IT, and some solid, proven skills, and a network of high potential indviduals who know what you are about.
An NQF level 5 National Certificate in IT is pretty cool and all, but we like to go above and beyond that.
In this phase you’ll take on an interesting problem to solve. It will tie a bunch of your different skills together.
This is different for everyone. You and your manager will decide on a project together.
As mentioned before, our recruitment portal was built by Umuzi recruits. Tilde also a project that recruits helped build - you’ll get to work on that pretty soon. We even use machine learning pipelines built by recruits in different parts of our organisation, and all sorts of little automations that help with our day to day work.
Umuzi is a growing, evolving, innovative organisation and we have a bunch of awesome projects underway.
Once you are done with your capstone project you will be allowed to join a product team.
This will polish your skills, working on a real team towards real goals is something else. It’s great preparation for the next phase.
After the first 9 months of your contract with us, we start watching you extra closely and preparing you for job interviews.
If we believe that you are work-ready then we hustle to get you an internship at an external company.
Note: If you are not work ready at this point, we will not be sending you out. We only send out our stars. So be aweseome!
Umuzi is a reputable training organisation and we will only vouch for you if we believe in you.
Also, VERY IMPORTANT, if you don’t go out for work experience for any reason at all, then you will NOT be given the top up. Umuzi will pay your R3500 per month until your contract is concluded. Unless, of course, if a new contract is signed by all parties.
Historically, in pre-covid conditions, about 80% of our recruits on work experience ended up staying at the hosting companies for longer than 3 months, many of them even got offers for perminant employment.
Your 12 months are up! Time to get hired. If your work experience hosting company didn’t hire you, then we work to find you another oppertunity.
We have a team of recruitment ninjas and a large network of employer partnerts. So we’re pretty good at placing people.
And if your job doesn’t last for whatever reason then you can get in touch with us and we’ll hook you up again.
Of course you need to be a “work ready” professional for us to do this.
Once you have gone through our program you are one of the family and we’ll continue supporting your career. You will have ongoing access to our services and syllabus.
If you are ever in need of a job, let us know and we’ll try find you a spot with one of our partners. Our recruitment ninjas are always happy to assist, and our network of employer organisations keeps growing.
On top of that, we will support your continued learning by keeping our platform and syllabus open to you. You’ll be able to register for other courses that we run, some of those courses will be advanced specialisations. When you complete these courses we’ll be able to give you our stamp of approval.
Our course offerings grow all the time. Maybe you are a web dev who wants to learn about cross platform mobile development, we’ll hook you up! Maybe you are a data-scientist and you want to learn about productionising your pipelines, we got you!
Umuzi is dedicated to opening doors for you! After you get your first real job, we’ll need you to help us open doors for other high potential people like you. Basically, all the stuff we do is quite expensive and we need to stay afloat. So our graduates help out by giving back a small portion of their salary for a little while.
Umuzi will work out a repayment plan that works for your pocket. Basically how it works is that you wont need to pay unless you are earning enough to do so. And payments will be calculated as a portion of your paycheck. We want to make sure that we don’t put you into a tough position so we stretch this out a bit instead of expecting all the money at once.
In total the required pay-it-forward amount is R34500, although some people choose to give more.
All funds paid back to Umuzi from recruits goes into an to supporting the next generation of talent.