A proficient high level programming program as a way to overcome unemployment among graduates

Unemployment has been a major concern in recent years. This is particular true for young people and in the case of Portugal for youngsters with a Higher Education degree. In this paper we describe the program “Acertar o Rumo”, a two years program to reconvert unemployed graduates in Engineering and Exact and Natural Science in experienced Java programmers. Particularly, we focus on the Programming courses of the program, where the two main programming paradigms, the procedural and the object-oriented, as well as principles and technologies for developing enterprise systems were taught. We describe the main methodologies and approaches followed and report the very positive results obtained with the first edition of the program till now. We finish the paper by proposing some recommendations and improvements for further editions.