Corporate Social Responsibility

The Directors believe that the Group's digital technology expertise has the potential to promote positive social outcomes.
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The Directors believe that the Group's digital technology expertise has the potential to promote positive social outcomes. The Group actively engages with educational and other organisations with the intent of encouraging entrants to the IT profession. It also runs a set of initiatives designed to encourage digital talent into the UK workforce.

 

Engagement with Education

The Directors believe that the Group's digital technology expertise has the potential to promote positive social outcomes and actively engages with educational organisations at various levels with the intent of encouraging entrants to the IT profession:

Local Schools

Kainos engages with high schools in Belfast (and more recently in Bristol and Swansea) to identify ways in which to help promote digital education for school leavers. An example of a school-focused initiative is the Kainos CodeCamp, aimed at showing young people how software is designed, built and tested.

University

The Group runs a number of initiatives including University Work Placements; Apprenticeship Schemes; Earn-as-you-Learn; and a University Engagement Programme. It runs these schemes in conjunction with the University of Ulster, Queen's University Belfast, University of London, University Of Wales (Trinity St. David's), Gdansk University of Technology and The University of Gdansk. The aim of these initiatives is to nurture career aspirations for those interested in digital technology and attract them to the digital workforce.

Workplace

Kainos' direct economic impact on the local community now extends to Bristol and Swansea, where in 2014 Kainos created a total of 13 new jobs. For professionals, Kainos runs the Kainos Career Path Development; Kainos Talent Programme; Kainos Advanced Education Programme; and Automated Test Academy. It runs these in conjunction with PluralSight, the Association of Computing Machinery and IEEE with the aim of developing talent and helping individuals fulfil their career ambitions in IT.

 

Digital Training Initiatives

Kainos Digital Training initiatives include 'hackathons', coding camps and innovative work placements for young people to get them excited about digital technology and these activities have proved as rewarding for the Group's staff as for the participants. This broad commitment to harnessing home-grown innovation has been underway for over three years and continued in 2014 through AppCamp programmes in Belfast, London and Gdansk, along with HealthHacks in Belfast and Dublin.

In June 2014, in collaboration with the Belfast Metropolitan College, Kainos launched its CodeCamp initiative for secondary school students, designed to bridge the gap between school-taught ICT and real-life software development. CodeCamp participants learnt how software is designed, built and tested and obtained an inside view of working as a software engineer. Partly as a result of the interest generated by CodeCamp, Kainos has developed a programme to lead the re-introduction of Computer Science teaching in schools by running CodeShows – a day-long introduction to the world of software development – for 12 partner secondary schools in the UK.