When June Odongo interviewed early-career electrical engineer Cynthia Wacheke for a software program engineering place at her firm, Wacheke lacked information of pc science concept however confirmed potential in advanced problem-solving.

Decided to present Wacheke a shot, Odongo turned to MIT OpenCourseWare to create a six-month “bridging course” modeled after the lessons she as soon as took as a pc science pupil. A part of MIT Open Studying, OpenCourseWare affords free, on-line, open instructional assets from greater than 2,500 programs that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. 

“Wacheke had the potential and curiosity to do the work that wanted to be completed, so the best way to resolve this was for me to actually create a path for her to get that work completed,” says Odongo, founder and CEO of Senga Applied sciences. 

Builders, Odongo says, will not be simple to seek out. The OpenCourseWare instructional assets supplied a strategy to shut that hole. “We put Wacheke via the course final yr, and she or he is so spectacular,” Odongo says. “Proper now, she is doing our first machine studying fashions. It’s insane how good of a staff member she is. She has completed a lot in such a short while.”

Making high-quality candidates job-ready

Wacheke, who holds a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from the College of Nairobi, began her skilled profession as a {hardware} engineer. She found a ardour for software program whereas engaged on a dashboard design venture, and determined to pivot from {hardware} to software program engineering. That’s when she found Senga Applied sciences, a logistics software program and providers firm in Kenya catering to companies that ship in Africa. 

Odongo based Senga with the aim of simplifying and easing the availability chain and logistics expertise, from the motion of products to software program instruments. Senga’s final aim, Odongo says, is to have most of their providers pushed by software program. Which means workers — and candidates — want to have the ability to suppose via advanced issues utilizing pc science concept.

“Lots of people are targeted on programming, however we care much less about programming and extra about problem-solving,” says Odongo, who obtained a bachelor’s diploma in pc science from the College of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MBA from Harvard Enterprise College. “We really apply the issues folks study in pc science packages.”

Wacheke began the bridging course in June 2022 and was given six months to finish the curriculum on the MIT OpenCourseWare web site. She took 9 programs, together with: Introduction to Algorithms; Arithmetic for Laptop Science; Design and Evaluation of Algorithms; Parts of Software program Building; Automata, Computability, and Complexity; Database Techniques; Rules of Autonomy and Resolution Making; Introduction to Machine Studying; and Networks. 

“The bridging course helped me discover ways to suppose via issues,” Wacheke says. “It’s one factor to know how one can do one thing, but it surely’s one other to design that factor from scratch and implement it.”

Throughout the bridging course, Wacheke was paired with a software program engineer at Senga, who mentored her and answered questions alongside the best way. She discovered Ruby on Rails, a server-side internet software framework beneath the MIT License. Wacheke additionally accomplished different tasks to enhance the idea she was studying. She created a brand new web site that included an integration to channel exterior requests to Slack, a cross-platform staff communication software utilized by the corporate’s workers.

Steady studying for staff members

The bridging course concluded with a presentation to Senga workers, throughout which Wacheke defined how the corporate may use graph concept for decision-making. “If you wish to get from level A to B, there are algorithms you should use to seek out the shortest path,” Wacheke says. “Since we’re a logistics firm, I believed we may use this after we’re deciding which routes our vans take.”

The presentation, which is the ultimate requirement for the bridging course, can also be knowledgeable growth alternative for Senga workers. “This course of is useful for our staff members, significantly those that have been out of college for some time,” Odongo says. “The candidates current what they’ve discovered in relation to Senga. It’s a means of doing steady studying for the present staff members.”

After efficiently finishing the bridging course in November 2022, Wacheke transitioned to a full-time software program engineer function. She is presently creating a “machine” that may interpret and categorize tons of of paperwork, together with supply notes, money flows, and receipts.

“The aim is to allow our clients to easily feed these paperwork into our machine, after which we are able to extra precisely learn and convert them to digital codecs to drive automation,” Odongo says. “The machine may even allow somebody to ask a doc a query, comparable to ‘What did I ship to retailer X on date Y?’ or ‘What’s the whole worth of the products delivered?’”

The bridging course, which was initially custom-designed for Wacheke, is now a everlasting program at Senga. A second staff member accomplished the course in October 2023 and has joined the software program staff full time. 

“Builders will not be simple to seek out, and also you additionally need high-quality builders,” Odongo says. “At the least after we do that, we all know that the particular person has gone via what we want.”