Dear fellow Java enthusiast,

one of the areas where software developers get disadvantaged is when they take maternity or paternity leave. Most of the time, this burden falls on the mother. Last Monday I was driving my daughter home from university and we were talking about careers and babies. She is studying primary school teaching. I told her that if she takes a couple of years off for maternity leave, her work will be mostly the same as when she left. This is not the case in our industry. Taking off a few years can severely curtail further success in our software development career. I've seen this happen.

After I got home, I thought it would be nice if there was something that we could do to help mothers of young children - and fathers too if they take their paternity leave - to come back more educated than when they left.

Enter: the [MP]aternity Stipend, giving FREE access to all my top #Java training

I would like to give away all 100 stipends before the end of 2019. I have a further limit of 5 per company. This stipend is for Java programmers of all levels currently on paternity or maternity leave. Once they get this stipend, their access to the material does not expire, so they can take their time to complete it, even once they go back to work. It is not limited by country, so anyone can apply from anywhere: Estonia, USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, India, South Africa, etc. I say that someone from the application country has to be subscribed to my newsletter, but that is a bit of a joke, since I've covered most of the globe anyway. I guess the Vatican is not on my list yet, but they also are unlikely to apply for this stipend ;-)

I have no idea how this project will work out nor what the response will be. I also don't know how much work it will entail for me, especially as I don't want people to cheat the system in order to get free training. This means I will need to do some verification of competence and that they are on genuine [mp]aternity leave.

Here's the full program: https://www.javaspecialists.eu/courses/stipend/ternity/

Please let me know what you think by replying directly to this email and also help spread the word. If you have colleagues currently on [mp]aternity leave, please let them know about this. Please forward it to your HR department in case they have programmers that could qualify.

Here is a link to my tweet in case you use Twitter.

Regards

Heinz