Today Yahoo! announced via the YUI blog that they’re seeking students for their Yahoo! Juku program. Yahoo! Juku is an interesting training opportunity in front-end development skills—“HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP”, plus more—as well as working experience within a guided program inside Yahoo. Yahoo is pretty direct about their goals for the Juku program, which are to grow talent they particularly need, train their own staff to teach (cool!) and also draw attention to the void around web skills in academic CS programs. Here’s Yahoo’s call-to-action:

If you’re a budding Front-End genius with a strong background in programming fundamentals and a passion to learn, [Yahoo! would] like to hear from you.
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The vision of the Juku program is to provide top-quality training in frontend technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP) with the ultimate goal of producing great frontend engineers. Participants are put through 3-4 months of intensive training taught by some of the best frontend engineers at Yahoo!, focusing not just on concepts, but also on best practices in terms of maintainability, accessibility, and performance.

I like that Yahoo is addressing the lack of CS dept. attention toward web development skills, while so many social websites bring web programming into day-to-day lingo. And in the ashes of the Yahoo-Microsoft merger coverage (disclosure: I work for partly MSFT), it is nice to see focus continue on efforts like education, even with so many open questions about where Yahoo heads next.

Read More At: http://www.digital-web.com/news/2008/05/yahoo_juku_program