From HelloWorld to first job:
a decade of changed careers.
A longitudinal study of the employment outcomes of young South Africans who trained as Software Developers at CodeSpace.
Read Impact ReportCodeSpace ran a rigorous, six-month Software Development Program from 2016 to 2026 as a mechanism for young people to move from low-wage work into a high-growth career in the tech industry.
This report presents the employment outcomes of graduates from 2016 through 2026, based on a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation study as evidence to inform practitioners, funders and policymakers who work to positively impact youth employment.
How the program workedon foundational learning skills to absorb a technical curriculum quickly. No degree required, no prior tech experience required. 57% of graduates arrived with Matric as their highest qualification.
by building. Students shipped working software throughout the program to develop a visible portfolio of skills.
for the workplace: communication, working to a brief, and the professional norms that are invisible to someone who has not worked in a professional setting before.
Graduates supported in entering the job market and through early career transitions.
Of the 829 graduates who completed and passed the program, this study draws on a sample of 508 who met the study criteria. See the full methodology.
“Graduates” - graduated 2016-23; 3+ years in the workforce
“Early graduates” - graduated 2016-19, 6+ years in the workforce
“Recent graduates” - graduated 2024-26, emerging employment outcomes
A reliable route into tech
Did graduates of CodeSpace enter a tech career?
of graduates who had no prior tech background broke into tech
82% of graduates who had no prior tech background, have held a tech job since completing the program. A “tech job” includes roles such as Development, Testing & QA, DevOps & Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, as well as tech-aligned roles such as Data & Analytics, IT Systems, UX and Product roles, as well as structured internships/ learnerships that are aligned to these roles.
But what happens if the graduates we could not track are skewing the data? We ran the data again and assumed that every graduate we could not trace never entered tech. Doing this, we can confirm that at least 67% of graduates have entered a tech role.
For recent graduates we have only seen a maximum of 60% of graduates with no prior experience convert to a tech role.
The start of long term careers
Did graduates stay employed long term?
are still in tech after 3 years
The important question is whether these careers lasted. 2 in 3 graduates are still in a tech career 3 or more years later.
The program's earliest graduates are advancing into technical leadership, holding senior positions including Specialist Software Developer, Software Engineer II, Web Development Team Lead, Head of Information Technology, Head of Operations, Production Support Engineer II, and Machine Learning Engineer. Graduates are employed in the tech teams of companies including Absa, Capitec, Coca-Cola, MTN, Sanlam, Woolworths, Nedbank, Microsoft, Accenture, Peach Payments and OneDayOnly.
A key to unlock potential
Who joined the tech industry via CodeSpace?
had Matric as their highest qualification
CodeSpace was built for the young South Africans whose secondary schooling has given them the foundation to learn quickly, but for whom the conventional university pathway to a high-potential career is inaccessible or unaffordable.
The median graduate was 25 when they finished the program and 57% of had Matric as their highest qualification. They came from work with little upward mobility: sales and retail; service; call centres and BPO; IT-adjacent support; tutoring; manual and agricultural work.
Arriving without a tertiary qualification did not measurably reduce a graduate's chance of building a tech career. Graduates who enrolled with only a Matric reached tech employment at 85.6% compared to those who enrolled with a degree who reached it at 88.5%. The difference is not significant enough to say that having a degree gave a student a better chance of entering employment.
CodeSpace had a deliberate mandate to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in the tech industry. 77% of graduates are Black African or Coloured. Two thirds are men and one third are women.
Working as a delivery driver was demanding, and work took so much from me. It felt like I was banging my head against a wall. Since becoming a web developer, my life has changed for the better. I’ve experienced many firsts: I moved out of my parents’ house, got married, and bought a house. I finally have job security.
A transformational shift in earnings
Did graduates achieve meaningful economic uplift?
graduates achieve the formal sector average wage by 4 years after graduation
The purpose of the Software Development Program was to unblock the path for a young person to contribute meaningfully to the economy and be able to earn a good living for themselves.
Half of graduates earn more than the average formal-sector worker (R29,490/month) within four years of graduating.
The median graduate earned R10,400/m in their first year of work.
The sample size of graduates with more than 6 years of experience is small, so we cannot draw conclusive figures. However, we see indicative trends of a steep and sustained trajectory, with median earners exceeding R45,000/month by year 8 (all figures from longitudinal salary records, expressed in real 2026 Rands).
Reaching the formal-sector average means a graduate in their twenties, most often with only a Matric, is out-earning the typical employed adult in South Africa. Importantly, at this income level, a young person can find stability and agency. It would be possible to afford medical insurance, build up long-term savings and access a homeloan.
The comparison to the average South African youth is stark. Nearly half (45.5%) of South Africa's youth are unemployed. For those who are employed, the median 25–34 year old earns R5,000 per month (Stats SA, Social Profile of Youth 2014–2024).
A fair comparison is to set our graduates’ current earnings against the likely earning trajectory of the careers they came from. Relative to their reported pre-program earnings, early graduates have 3x more purchasing power, and the top quartile has 5x more purchasing power. These are real figures, adjusted to 2026 Rands.
First-year median earnings for graduates have fallen by more than half in real terms. Where a 2017–18 graduate walked into earnings of about R14,000/m, recent graduates can expect roughly R6,000/m.
From graduate to senior engineer in two years.
Mamo finished the six-month full-time program in February 2023. Four weeks later she started as a Junior Application Engineer at Peach Payments — hired through CodeSpace's employer network. By mid-2025 she'd been promoted to Senior Application Engineer.
"The CodeSpace career coach helped me prepare for my interviews and I got the job through their employment network."
A critical downward trend
This report highlights a critical downward trend in employment outcomes. In recent years the report shows that graduates have transitioned into tech careers far less reliably and have achieved lower earnings.
The decrease in median earnings reflects an increasing number of graduates moving into “learnship programs” that pay program stipends of R1800 - R5000/m rather than true entry-level salaries.
A learnership program is designed as a ±12-month paid learning program that trains an unemployed candidate for a specific employer's needs and the latter months of the program include a work-integrated learning component.
We looked at the impact of a graduate’s first step into the workplace. Where we saw a significant difference in employment outcomes was when we compared what happened to graduates who went into externally run programs, vs those who were absorbed into internally run talent programs.
Some employers host these directly, but many learnership programs run at an external training provider. This means that are although they are paid for out of an employer's skills levy, they are run independently of that employer's operations and hiring pipeline.
Of the graduates whose first step after CodeSpace was an externally-run learnership, only 1 in 5 (19%) are in a tech or tech-aligned role today, and almost half (46%) are unemployed.
By comparison, 64% of the graduates whose first step was an internally-run internship are in a tech or tech-aligned role today, and 18% are unemployed.
On paper, learnerships are a fantastic employment intervention but in reality, when they are outsourced away from the sponsoring company, we have seen them occupy young people's time and produce certificates, but not, on average, change what those young people earn five years later.
Our findings are consistent with a national-level audit of SETA-accredited programs' ability to deliver employment outcomes, which showed that for every 100 youth to start a SETA-accredited learnership/apprenticeship/ internship, only 20 throughput to employment (Botha & Havemann, ERSA Policy Paper 42, August 2025).
This report looks backward and asks what happened to graduates of CodeSpace's Software Development Program. It shows that for ten years the program has been a reliable pathway for young South Africans into a high-earning career in tech. Four in five graduates who arrived with no tech background broke into a tech career. Most are still in tech years later, some in senior roles, and half were out-earning the average formal-sector worker within four years.
The outcomes of our recent graduates suggest this is no longer the trajectory we can expect in the current market. Fewer recent graduates have moved into tech roles, and their first-year earnings are less than half of what a 2017/18 graduate earned.
With more than 2 million unemployed young people in the country, the problem of lost potential remains, but the opportunity seems to have shifted. This is why CodeSpace closed the program in August 2026 but we hold open the question as to where the opportunity lies now.
How this study was built.
This study looks at the employment outcomes of 829 graduates who completed and passed CodeSpace's Software Development Program.
This study is based on a sample of 508 graduates who met the following criteria:
- Completed CodeSpace’s full Software Development Program (excluded short course graduates)
- Selection and training owned end-to-end by CodeSpace (excluded cohorts run in partnership with another organisation where selection/ training was not owned end-to- end)
- Reliable employment data is available.
The sample is segmented as follows:
The unit of analysis is the employment position: a single role held by a graduate. 1,503 positions were logged across the tracked cohorts, each recording role title, company, duration and salary (where available). Data was collected from placement records, graduate surveys, graduate provided CVs and publicly available LinkedIn and Github. 25% of the logged positions holds an estimated salary based on comparable graduate records and market information.
The headline indicator is whether a graduate ever held a tech or tech-aligned role at or after graduation. Qualifying roles comprise core tech roles (Development, Testing & QA, DevOps & Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Code coach/lecturer), tech-aligned roles (Data & Analytics, IT Support & Systems, Design & UX, Product & Project), and internal or external internships and learnerships that are aligned to these roles. Roles that started and ended before graduation are not counted, with a three-month grace period applied.
This is an "ever" measure: it captures whether the program achieved the career transition. This headline indicator excludes graduates who held a tech role prior to enrolling at CodeSpace.
To control for missing data, we reported headline findings along with a conservative lower bound that assumed that every untraceable graduate failed to enter a tech career.
Current employment status is reported separately as a measure of durability: did the career transition last beyond an initial placement or contract.