By Zubin Irani, CEO, cPrime
cPrime is happy to be members of the Pledge 1% #PledgeItForward campaign. Mandating 1% of employee time to charitable causes is a social initiative that we’ve been contributing to for many years. We’re excited to share our continued involvement with organizations like Year Up, a non-profit organization dedicated to training urban young adults in tech careers.
Through a high-support high expectations model paired with an intensive curriculum and corporate internship, Year Up provides urban young adults the opportunity to develop and enhance their professional and educational potential. Since 2000, Year Up has transformed the lives of more than 13,000 young adults with proven results. Four months after the program, 89% of Year Up Bay Area graduates are employed full-time or in college full-time. On average, Year Up Bay Area graduates make $18.00 an hour or around $36,000 a year as a result of the program.
Now in it’s 5th year, cPrime’s Year Up training focuses on the basics of Project Management and dives deeper into the Agile methodology. Our team continues to make sure that the class is practical for students by incorporating workshops with real world concepts for the younger non-project management students. The Agile Essentials Workshop is a comprehensive topic geared towards helping customers adopt Agile, overcome the roadblocks of adopting a new methodology all while learning the fundamental ceremonies of a Scrum project. The students receive an initial understanding of Agile methodologies which are based on iterative and incremental development. They learn about adaptive planning and how to be flexible and responsive to change. Students then are given practical hands-on knowledge of Scrum and skills conducted in the workshop so that they can directly apply these to future internships and job opportunities. The fun part is when the students simulate a real Scrum project with sprints, stories and retrospectives.
Brandon Huff, cPrime’s Agile Coach who conducts Year Up’s training, explains how the skills of a Project Manager are relevant to any career these students may choose to go into, “Learning communication skills, project, time, and team management skills are key to the majority of roles these students will employ”. Jay Banfield, Founding Executive Director of Year Up Bay Area, explains, “This kind of contribution from cPrime offers our students incredible value and makes them even more prepared for the careers they will now have access to. We look forward to continuing trainings with cPrime in the future.” Year Up Bay Area student, Oscar Munoz, shares his feedback on the training, “I didn’t know anything about the Agile process before this training and now, I walked away with a working definition for scrum, agile and waterfall. Even better, now I can actually talk through the concepts. Brandon is a skilled instructor and I appreciated that the training was very interactive – I was never bored.”
To learn more about Year Up and see the many student success stories from the program, please visit
Originally posted: November 29. 2016
