Shopify celebrates the first ‘Dev Degree’ graduates

The Ottawa headquarters of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify are pictured on Wednesday, May 29, 2019. (Justin Tang / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

OTTAWA — Ottawa-based Shopify is celebrating the graduation of its first students from the “Dev Degree” student-training program.

Shopify has been working with computer-science students at Carleton University to prepare them for jobs in the real world.

In the “Dev-Degree” program, Carleton students work at least 20 hours a week with Shopify, while pursing computer science courses on campus. The idea is to bridge the gap between academic learning in the classroom and real-world experience with a company.

Shopify’s Alison Evans Adnani says “we realize that if we brought students in early and gave them work experience, we would be able to close the gap and they would be more effective as full-time developers earlier than if they had joined after their degree.”

Shopify says 88 per cent of the “Dev Degree” program graduates will be entering full-time roles at Shopify.

“I think having that kind of tight feedback group and getting to practice skills right away was a really great way to solidify the computer science concepts I was learning,” says Adrianna Chang, a “Dev Degree” graduate.

The four-year "Dev Degree" program in conjunction with Carleton University was launched in 2016. Shopify says the program is designed to help computer science graduates, who may struggle to find meaningful employment in the software industry due to a lack of experience working with professional software development teams.