The Edtech sector is growing at a major rate these days. It’s expected that it will at least triple its value within the next ten years. Consequently, the urge of businesses to invest in this sector is far from surprising. Numerous people are willing to consider it because they may expect a significant long-term return on investments.
If you’re among the individuals who want to invest in edtech, it’s essential to understand what distinguishes stronger businesses in the sector from weaker ones. In this respect, one of the core factors is their workforce. Individuals behind the key projects in the sector often define the quality of the involved products. A combination of learning experts and coders can ensure a stable and evidence-based approach to development.
In this post, our goal is to outline the core characteristics of the development professionals that you need to consider while hiring for an edtech business. More importantly, we’ll also give some tips on finding an expert edtech development company to accompany you in your development journey.
Step 1. Identify the core elements of expertise
Primarily, you need to understand what types of developers are essential for your project. Different projects need different experts. On the one hand, a project that involves Learning Management Systems may require a specialist with knowledge of web and database development. On the other hand, a language-learning app may require someone who is an expert in UI/UX and cross-platform programming (for instance, via React Native). These diverging experts can bring different types of benefits to your business. Thus, it’s crucial for you to know the differences between their core skills. Ultimately, making a correct choice in this regard is possible only if you focus on understanding the core requirements of your business.
Step 2. Look for education-centric expertise
This aspect of development is two-fold. Firstly, you should generally look for experts who already have some experience working in edtech. Edtech projects have specific technological requirements (for instance, in terms of information encryption), necessitating similarly particular knowledge for proper execution. For example, several modern language learning platforms are making massive investments in AI. Only a specialist with AI knowledge is capable of inserting it properly into a new edtech project. This AI knowledge has to be specific as copywriting and language-learning chatbots serve different functions and require highly different approaches to implementing various prompts.
Secondly, we mean education-centric expertise in a more specific way. While it’s enough for non-lead developers to focus on solely technological expertise in edtech, it’s far from being sufficient for the core managers. Why? Edtech isn’t only about the tech part. If you focus solely on the technological experts, there’s a risk of creating an app that may be perfect from the standpoint of software but lackluster concerning learning methodology.
Learning-oriented peer-reviewed research is abundant these days, and it clearly highlights that many things people consider “efficient” in education are far from being sufficient. For example, a popular framework of learning styles is debunked by science. In reality, human learning doesn’t rely on audial or kinesthetic cues alone to be potent: instead, it has to be multimodal to be successful. For instance, few people manage to get proficient in math by listening to lectures. In many cases, it’s also crucial to actually see various formulae to succeed.
It’s this expertise that is often lacking in modern edtech. Experts in technology are often too confident about inefficient learning styles. Hence, we recommend finding specialists with degrees in the education sector to guarantee the success of your app. A combination of education and technology knowledge is especially vital in the modern world.
Step 3. Identify companies with the most significant amount of expertise
In our opinion, the best chance at finding individual developers or whole expert teams occurs when you focus on companies rather than various outsourcing freelance platforms. Why do we favor companies over finding individual contractors online? The first reason is that such businesses already have well-established teams. This means the experts who work within them have a positive reputation for delivering high-quality results.
The second reason lies in the fact that those firms have stable organizational frameworks. For example, if you hire a team of outsourcing specialists from a specialized business, it’ll already have both social structures and a strong commanding hierarchy. In this way, you’ll not need to spend time on improving worker communication or choosing the right project manager.
What are the core factors to consider while selecting outsourcing companies to work with on the market? They must have a combination of edtech experience and a group of developers with advanced knowledge in this field. The best way to find out such information is by focusing on three types of data. You should review the company’s history to see how long it has been on the market. Then, it’s essential to review the expertise of the firm in a particular sector. Lastly, a major factor is to look at the reviews about the business online. All this information is crucial for finding out the expertise of the organization and its reputation. Upon establishing these factors, a good idea is to also contact the involved business and ask its specialists about the available experts.
Conclusion
All in all, you need to focus on three steps for finding high-quality edtech software development specialists. Firstly, you must understand your core requirements and adjust accordingly: different specialists fit different projects. Secondly, a vital factor is to analyze the expertise of the involved individuals. They must be great coders, but a significant aspect is also their capability in terms of education. Edtech is a combination of education and technology: being a technology expert is often not enough. Lastly, you should search for companies rather than individual developers per se. They typically have more resources to find great specialists and concentrate them in one place. What are some good examples of organizations that fit the criteria we’ve described above? Search for companies such as Keenethics, which have multiple years of experience and several edtech projects in their portfolios.
