Andela Targets 15,000 Technologists with Expanded AI Academy to Bridge Global Skills Gap
Andela, the global marketplace for technical talent, has announced a significant expansion of its Andela AI Academy.
The initiative has transitioned into a production-focused upskilling program designed to equip both individuals and enterprise teams with the skills necessary for high-level AI development, ensuring organizations can maintain their momentum in an increasingly automated landscape.
Originally established as a collaborative effort with GitHub to provide instruction on GitHub Copilot, the Academy has evolved into a comprehensive educational ecosystem. The program now features multiple learning tracks rooted in practical enterprise requirements. With a bold goal to train 15,000 technologists by 2026, Andela aims to establish the world’s largest pipeline of AI-fluent engineering talent. This strategy is two-fold: providing a fresh influx of “enterprise-ready” experts while simultaneously offering a training as a service (TAAS) model to help companies elevate their existing internal staff.
“The speed of AI innovation is outpacing organizations’ ability to create value from it,” stated Carrol Chang, CEO of Andela. “Specifically in software development, teams are struggling to keep up with new tools, frameworks, and delivery patterns causing slower development cycles, rising costs, and stalled prototypes. Leaders know what they need to build—AI copilots, automation, RAG pipelines—but lack the internal fluency and execution confidence to make it real.”
To address these hurdles, the Academy focuses on four specialized pillars. The LLM Engineering track covers the foundations of Generative AI, including prompt engineering and model evaluation. The Agentic AI Engineering track focuses on the creation of autonomous agents and orchestration frameworks. For those focused on deployment, the AI in Production track dives into MLOps, security, and scalability across major cloud platforms. Finally, an AI Leadership track provides non-technical professionals with the strategic and commercial decision-making tools required to lead AI initiatives within a business context.
The program’s efficacy is already being felt by its earliest participants. The first 80 graduates have completed training as Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), a role that blends deep technical architecture with commercial acumen. Another 200 participants recently finished an AI Engineering program that focused on scalable agentic architectures and real-world deployment. Asoluka Tochukwu Austin, a graduate from Nigeria, noted that the training “sharpened my ability to break down business problems and map them to the right GenAI approach, not just building something that ‘looks like AI,’ but something that actually fits into an organization’s existing systems and delivers measurable value.”
Andela anticipates that these initial 280 graduates will be absorbed into the job market rapidly given the current high demand for AI proficiency. New cohorts are scheduled to open for applications this February, offering free training to the more than 150,000 technologists already within the Andela network.
By integrating this training into the daily flow of work, Andela intends to help businesses avoid the need to pause their product roadmaps during transitions. As Chang noted, “The half-life of technical skills is shrinking, and learning has to happen continuously.”
The ultimate goal is a seamless evolution where organizations can pair their re-skilled internal teams with Andela’s AI-native talent to maintain delivery momentum and build a durable foundation for the future of engineering.
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