Kainos is Delivering for Both Belfast and Northern Ireland, According to Belfast Lord Mayor Muilleoir

Belfast, Northern Ireland - September 25th, 2013

Digital solutions company Kainos welcomed Lord Mayor Máirtín Ó Muilleoir to its Belfast offices to hear about its growth plans, its track record in focusing on healthcare and government digital services and its strategies to boost employment. The Lord Mayor came away with a very positive impression from the presentations he was given by the Kainos team, including recent graduates proof, he commented, on the company's commitment and focus on both its workforce and the local Belfast community. Kainos has enjoyed a great deal of commercial success, on track to become a £50 million business with a 500-plus strong workforce and a network of six offices. The firm has also long prided itself on the calibre of its workforce, as demonstrated by the fact that Kainos was catapulted straight in at number 55 in The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For 2013, a key metric for applauding the UK's most engaged and supportive employers. The company's talent is highly qualified: 98% are university graduates, with 80% holding first-class honours degrees. The reasons the company is able to attract these exceptional candidates is the unique Kainos work culture, as well as the number of special initiatives the company runs to bring on local talent, including ones aimed at encouraging more women to enter the world of IT. Kainos AppCamp and CodeCamp The schemes, collectively dubbed Nurturing Digital Skills, are, 'about empowering and developing the next generation of IT talent' according to Kainos developer Davey McGlade. For example, Kainos's Code4Derry and AppCamp projects provide bright university students with first-hand commercial experience in creating socially useful apps for citizens and community. The most impressive initiative, according to the Lord Mayor is CodeCamp, an imaginative and compelling event for 16 to 19 year olds that is designed to give them exposure to IT and writing code. 'It's about bridging the gap between ICT as it is taught in high school, which is typically about spreadsheets and documents, and real-life software development, which is about building an app or a software program,' Davey pointed out. Kainos's encouragement for women as fully active technologists Presenting on the firm's latest 'Women in IT' initiative, designed to encourage greater career participation by young girls and women in technology, Sheree Atcheson at Kainos, explained that the new strategy has a number of goals:

• to encourage girls to consider IT as a career by promoting the message in schools
• to dispel the myth that 'developers sit in some sort of Development Dungeon, a very male lair'
• to introduce a female oriented app stream to CodeCamp
• to create a separate female-only CodeCamp

Kainos as a Belfast leadership firm In the view of Belfast's Lord Mayor Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, 'The future is the knowledge economy - and I wish all the businesses I meet were as future-focused as Kainos.' Lord Mayor Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is also keen to congratulate Kainos on its activities for the local business base and community: 'I love CodeCamp! In fact I support all the things you are doing in terms of encouraging progress and building technology to benefit people's lives. 'This is a great contribution to Belfast. You are a not only operating internationally but also making great contributions to our city and local economy, as well as to the community here.' 'It's great to have the Lord Mayor's backing and his recognition for our proactive work to create opportunities for young people, and particularly for women,' commented Kainos's CEO, Brendan Mooney. 'We will continue to support and work with the community in this way.'