On Friday, 9th of September, 2022, Africa’s leading tech talent institute, Decagon, held a memorable dinner and awards ceremony in Lagos to celebrate the milestone of enabling over 500 DecaDevs, as Decagon graduates are called, to secure full-time jobs as software engineers across various companies worldwide.
Decagon, which set out on an ambitious mission in 2018 to enable exceptional young Nigerians to launch careers as world-class software engineers has now graduated 10 cohorts with over 500 software engineers now working at companies like Indeed (US), JP Morgan (UK), as well as Nigerian companies like Microsoft, Sterling, RenMoney, MaxNG, Sterling, Carbon, Max, Kobo360, Access, Wema, Terragon, Opay, Interswitch, and many others.
Speaking at the event, The founder and CEO of Decagon Chika Nwobi commented
“We have a specific mission for Nigeria. We want her to be a top-10 software engineering nation and Decagon’s role in that is to produce the best-of-the-best who will pursue a standard of excellence as software engineers and eventually grow into engineering leaders. We want the brightest to get access to this life-changing opportunity regardless of their ability to pay, so we provide accommodation, feeding, stipends, laptops, and training on a learn-first-and-pay-later model. We equip the DecaDevs to land jobs in top companies and we are proud of them for the 100% success rate and for also faithfully repaying their loans. “
He further went on to appreciate Sterling bank for believing in Decagon and investing in young Nigerians as a strategic student loan partner.
In attendance at this memorable milestone were Laurens Kreuze, the global CFO of Lumos global, the Co-founder of Appzone Emeka Emetarom, representatives from Sterling Bank, Microsoft, Main One, and other well-known faces in the African tech space.
Commenting at the event on Decagon’s impact, Joshua Christopher, a Decadev mentioned “Decagon was a catalyst to achieving my career goals. What I would have achieved in 5 years, I was able to achieve in 2 short years”.
Chidinma Ifeh stated “After Decagon, I was placed in a tech company Terragon. I worked as a back-end engineer, I use Node stack. I won’t have been able to do this without Decagon.”
Employees from Decagon were not left out of the celebration. Fourteen employees of Decagon were recognized for their hard work and contributions towards achieving the mission and vision of the company.
Decagon is currently recruiting for the next cohort at www.decagon.institute. Companies looking to hire Decagon graduates can request them at www.decagonhq.com/fellowship.
