The dearth of capable software and systems engineers is getting so great that a group of industry veterans have taken it upon themselves to tackle the problem, establishing a new “hands-on” school to train budding full stack software engineers in the latest and greatest IT technologies.

Opened this week, the Holberton School in San Francisco is aiming to train students to become “high quality full-stack software engineers” in just two years via project-based and peer learning methods that have already seen considerable success in Europe. In addition, the school is also hoping to promote more diversity in tech by encouraging more women to pursue a career in software engineering. As such, the school is named in honor of one Betty Holberton, who was one of the six female programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the world’s first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

The Holberton School sets itself apart by using quite radical teaching methods that were first established by the European Institute of Technology in France. The main focus is on project-based learning, wherein students learn by diving straight in and getting to grips with the software tools they will hopefully become experts in. The approach is generally held to be far more effective than traditional rote-learning methods, and the European Institute of Technology’s record speaks for itself, with more than 1,500 graduates per year, 100 percent of whom secure high-paid jobs.

With the establishment of the Holberton School, many technology startups will be hopeful that the days of the software skills shortage will soon be a thing of the past.

“Every year it gets harder for companies to hire high quality full-stack software engineers as the opportunities driven by software innovation become greater,” said Alex Solomon, PagerDuty Co-Founder and CEO, in a statement. “It’s exciting to see the Holberton system has already been proven not just to train world-class engineers, but to very quickly scale to train many, even thousands, of software engineers.”

The IT skills shortage is no joke. SiliconANGLE has spoken to numerous company CIOs and the question of talent comes up again and again. Moreover, these recruitment challenges will only get worse if nothing is done. According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, the demand for software developers will rise by 22 percent a year through 2012 to 2022, and by 2020 there will be 1.4 million jobs with only 400,000 computer sciences graduates to fill them.

With such a serious shortfall in talent available, it’s no surprise to learn the Holberton School has picked up some serious backers in the form of Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick; board of directors, Docker and New Relic); Jerry Yang (co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo!), Partech Ventures, Solomon Hykes (co-founder of Docker) and Jonathan Boutelle (co-founder of Slideshare). Together, these investors have just ploughed $2 million into Holberton School as part of an initial seed round. Besides this money, Holberton School is backed by something even more important – it boasts the combined knowledge of more than 70 mentors from top tech firms including Amazon.com, Inc., Google, Facebook.com Inc., IBM, Netflix, Uber Technologies Inc., and many others.

“By helping get Holberton School off the ground, we feel we are not just helping the school, and not just the thousands of companies around the world desperate for software engineers, but everyone who will benefit from the technologies these students will help create,” said Scholnick.

Holberton School is open to students of all ages and backgrounds, and is now accepting applications for its inaugral January class.

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