The 2024 iHub Africa Boot Camp is done and dusted!
Boot camp is an immersive 4-day in-person process designed to put students through a range of tests and activities to evaluate their skills competency, their motivation for applying and their social skills baseline, to determine their suitability for the program. This year’s Boot Camp commenced on 24-Jan and ran for three consecutive weeks where each week brought approximately 30 prospective students through the various tests and evaluations.
The 2024 intake program received almost 2,900 applications! These were filtered down to a final set of 249 who received a Boot Camp invitation. Although 203 of these RSVP’d “yes”, in the end 89 showed up for one of the three 3 boot camp weeks. We’ve seen this heavy attrition trend over the years and we’re still trying to get our heads around how to improve the stats of who finally pitches up from those who say their coming. Its incredulous to think that in a country with 60% youth unemployment, that a FREE program like the iHub, which imparts the digital and human skills in just 1 year needed to land a great digital marketing job with our partners, that they’d be “breaking the doors down” to try get a seat in the program. These are the mysteries that we’re still unlocking as we head into our 5th year of offering this unique and exceptional learning experience for young South African black adults trying to break out of generational cycles of poverty and hopelessness.
The great news is that the team has settled on and offered seats to 58 boot campers who will form our 2024 cohort, which launches in phase 1 of the program on Monday 4-Mar. This is our largest cohort yet in our Johannesburg hub and probably the max we can accommodate physically without adding a second hub site. This high-potential group of passionate students show excellent promise and we’re believing that 2024 will be our strongest year ever and that we’ll be able to graduate our largest cohort of students yet come December.
All three weeks of Boot Camp students!
The iHub Team has expanded as well for 2024 and we’re excited to have a newly-hired Social Worker, Zanelle heading up our Student Journey, Coaching and Alumni role as well as a new Program Coordinator, Nadia (the student I coached last year) supporting our Program Director – Liz. I look forward to spotlighting these new additions to the team in coming months’ posts.
We’ll check in again in April to see how the new 2024 cohort is moving ahead with their iHub learning journey. Until then…. Andy