The Cloud & DevOps Academy by ITCE and KPMG IT Service Sofia provides a Fast-track to a Career in IT for aspiring young talent

“ITCE and KPMG IT Service OOD share the mission to contribute to the professional development of young talent in the local IT market by providing them with best-in-class training and career realisation within a leading international company.”

Fast-track to Career in IT

Having first-hand experience goes a long way to having a successful career in IT. Together, leading IT services organisations and learning providers can achieve so much and make the greatest of difference. KPMG IT Service Sofia and ITCE, a proud member of the LLPA, want to contribute to the IT ecosystem, an ecosystem, that drives the creation and delivery of information technology products and services. They plan to achieve this by continuing to provide a combination of best-in-class training and career-starter-modules to bright and motivated young IT talent.

For its’ second year running, the two companies officially launched yet another 5-month long Cloud & DevOps Academy which aims to quip recent university graduates with the necessary skillset and project experience to kick-off their career at KPMG IT Service. After the first successful edition of the academy, 17 alumni had started a career in IT at KPMG IT Service Sofia and KPMG International in The Netherlands. The success of the initial project led to the strategic decision of the company making the Cloud & DevOps Academy an annual initiative.

Students learn from highly qualified professionals – including their future team leads and mentors at KPMG IT Service, and ITCE professional trainers. Students can choose a specific career development area during the application process with the ability to further specialise in Azure Cloud Infrastructure, SharePoint, DevOps, Applications, Microsoft 365, and Open Source Infrastructure as one of the most recent improvements introduced by the academy this year.

Career Specializations & Certification

All students go through a fundamental’s academy stage (called Main Branch) during which they will attend professional training courses in Microsoft Azure, DevOps practices, Networking, Windows Server, Identity in the modern enterprise and other. Additionally, they will have sessions dedicated to Productivity with Microsoft 365 and the Office suite, soft-skills and project management to obtain essential enterprise-readiness skills.

Following the fundamentals stage, students will go into the career development specializations (called Branches) where they will work closely with their future colleagues and mentors and obtain more on-the-job skills and project experience.

Students will also go through two certification milestones during which they will complete Microsoft Azure certification exams to obtain well-respected qualifications for their efforts and skillset.

Academy Curriculum & Design

The design of the curriculum prepared by ITCE and key-stakeholders from KPMG IT Service included:

• In-depth interviews with the team managers
• C-level alignment regarding the talent development strategy of KPMG IT Service
• Microsoft’s role-based certifications and job task analysis research

To ensure the comfort and safety of the participants this year, the Cloud & DevOps Academy will take place online. The program combines various methods such as virtual instructor-led classes, labs, project work, self-paced learning sessions and virtual mentor sessions. ITCE, as a strategic learning partner of KPMG IT Service Sofia, have delivered Train-the-Trainer sessions to the academy trainers to ensure consistency and quality in the training experience.