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In an effort to help increase its own talent pool and the global developer community, Progress Software today launched Progress Academy, an education program to help new developers quickly acquire application development skills.
The program is aimed at helping aspiring developers attain skills to use Progress OpenEdge for enterprise-class application development. The announcement was made during the 2015 ProgressNEXT for Partners event Jan. 31 through Feb. 3 in Las Vegas. OpenEdge is Progress Software’s core application development platform for enterprises.
Based on feedback from customers and partners looking to address the IT skills gap, coupled with the exponential growth of 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 new skills to develop applications. 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, the company said.
“Digital business is impacting how CIOs develop their organizations,” according to a Gartner report released last month called Enhancing IT Skills and Competencies Primer for 2016. “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.”
Progress Academy students will learn skills new developers need to design, build and test business applications using the Progress OpenEdge platform.
The four-week course will run three to four 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, a variety 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 at Progress, in a statement. “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.”
Meanwhile, in December, Progress shipped the latest release of its Telerik Platform for mobile app development for iOS, Android and Windows Phone applications.
The release, Telerik Platform 2.0, enables developers to create mobile user experiences with high productivity in a fraction of the time, the company said.
By enabling developers to have complete access to the app development lifecycle from a single app-centric interface, Telerik Platform saves developers considerable effort and time. Developers are able to develop, connect, test, deploy and measure the app from a single unified interface, cutting through the effort often required when working with multiple disparate technologies.
And last month, Progress delivered the latest release of its Telerik DevCraft suite, a .NET toolbox for Web, mobile and desktop development that introduces support for AngularJS 2, the popular JavaScript development framework.
Developed by Google and refined with the help of the community, Angular 2 delivers enhancements to help developers produce highly responsive Web apps for a variety of platforms. Telerik, a Progress company, claims to be the first to market in delivering UI for Angular 2—also known as AngularJS 2.