The Telerik Academy free training program for .NET software engineers is an exciting opportunity for smart and motivated young people to be trained for 6 months for real world software engineers and start their professional career.

C# Fundamentals Course – Part I

We started our first training season in March 2010 with free C# programming course for 6 groups of 16 students. Students attended this course were selected among nearly 250 candidates who were filtered by CV, cover letter, English test, IQ test and computer science test. Best performing 96 candidates started their free trainings in class with the bases of computer programming course (Fundamentals of C# Programming Course – Part I). The first course was just the start. It was held for 1 month (3 times weekly) and was focused on writing simple C# programs with primitive data types, loops and arrays. Trainers were Svetlin Nakov, the principal technical trainer in Telerik Corporation and Momchil Tomov, winner in many Informatics Olympiads.

C# Fundamentals Course – Part II

After a month of trainings with lectures, exercises, assignments and problems solving in class the best 36 attendees (2 groups x 18 students) were selected through an exam to attend the second part of the course (Fundamentals of C# Programming Course – Part II) which focuses on more complicated fundamental programming concepts such as advanced data structures (hash tables, balanced trees, etc.), algorithms, high-quality code construction and problems solving methodology. This course was really advanced and could be compared to the best courses in programming fundamentals, data structures and algorithms in the top 5% of the Universities worldwide. Trainers again were Svetlin Nakov and Momchil Tomov. Problems solved in class and at the graduation exams were nearly the same level like at the Bulgarian National Olympiad of Informatics. The course took 1 month of everyday learning, practicing and problems solving. The final exam was really hard, consisting of 4 problems (Olympiad-level) for 5 hours.

C# Fundamentals Course – Part II

Both C# fundamentals courses were based on the leading free computer programming fundamentals book “Introduction to programming with C#” authored by Svetlin Nakov and his team. All lecture materials, PowerPoint slides, live demonstrations, exercises as well as video-trainings are available for free download and use from the Telerik Academy Web site, in the section C# Programming Fundamentals.

.NET Essentials Course

The best 18 students graduated the C# Fundamentals course will continue their real world software engineering trainings for more 3 months in the course “.NET Development Essentials” which covers the most important .NET development technologies such as databases, XML, ADO.NET, LINQ, LINQ-to-SQL, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET and AJAX, Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), web services, WCF as well as software engineering fundamental concepts and team working.

Selection Process and Employment in Telerik

Students awarded to take part in the “.NET Essentials” course are selected through an internal selection process which includes series of exams and individual interviews. Telerik trains people for free not just for fun but because it is growing by employing really motivated and extremely skillful young developers that could not be found in the Universities or from other software development companies (with some small exceptions). It is well-known that Telerik is better employer than 95% of the IT companies in Bulgaria due to his excellent team, challengeable projects, cutting edge technologies, development processes based on industry’s best practices, good remuneration and benefits and great work atmosphere. Thus we can easily attract and hire people from other software companies but our requirements are very, very high and the candidates coming from other companies just can’t meet them (with some exceptions). This is the reason why we started our training center and the Telerik Academy free .NET trainings program. We want to train and grow our own .NET ninja developers because we can’t find enough tremendously skillful, well motivated and exciting .NET software engineers to hire. Telerik is large and powerful corporation and we want to grow not just for the number of developers but for extreme quality that drives our success. That’s why we are investing to produce super skillful great developers.

After our internal selection process the best 18 people will start their training in the .NET Essentials course for 3 months (everyday, full time) and will be hired in Telerik as internship trainees. After their graduation they will expand our development teams and will enter in their professional software development career by unique high speed jumpstart like no other else.

The next season of Telerik Academy is planned for September 2010 when new 96 people with have the chance to be trained for free in our unique top-quality training center for .NET developers. In the mean time you could join our official discussion group at https://softuni.bg/forum.