No portfolio projects. No sandboxed demos. Every graduate has a named, verifiable artefact in production and a public reference letter that links straight to it.
The reference letter is a live URL at builtinireland.ie, not a PDF someone emailed you. Before you speak to a graduate, you can already see exactly what they built and where it is.
Every Academy graduate has a page at builtinireland.ie/references/their-name that tells you:
— Which cohort they ran in and what project they worked on
— The exact role they held in the cohort
— The specific deliverables they shipped (with live links to each one)
— A co-signature from Built In Ireland and Raven Design
— A two-paragraph self-reflection written by the graduate at graduation
You don't need to take their word for it. The work is on the live site. Click the link, see the thing they built.
The reference format is the same for every graduate. Content varies by role and deliverable.
The Academy runs four tracks. Graduates come out of one of these, and the reference letter tells you which one. Here's what each track actually produces.
Started with zero coding experience. Leaves having built and shipped something functional using Cursor, GitHub, and a live deployment pipeline.
Not just a writer — a writer whose work is indexed, ranked, and linked. Has gone from brief to live on a real Irish content site.
Built a working scraper against a real Irish public data source (council, courts, planning). Structured messy HTML into clean, usable JSON.
Verified a county’s worth of directory data from primary sources. Phone calls, cross-referencing, structured output. The unglamorous work that makes databases trustworthy.
Not a PDF. A live page you can link to, share internally, and come back to. The reference doesn't expire.
Code, content, or data that is live on a real Irish site with real traffic. Not a demo, not a mockup.
Someone who worked with them weekly for four weeks and said yes. That opinion is available to you too — ask us.
Cohort 1 (County Carlow, localnews.ie) is open for signups now. Here’s when the first graduates will be available.
Applications via theacademy.ie/apply/. Seven roles across Vibe Coding, Editorial SEO, Civic Tech, and Directory Data tracks.
Cohort 1 kicks off the week after eight members are confirmed. No fixed calendar date.
Reference letters go live on builtinireland.ie. Graduates appear on theacademy.ie/graduates/. Available to hire immediately.
Editorial sprint on myid.ie (Cohort 2) and directory data on pubhub.ie (Cohort 3) follow in sequence. Pre-apply at the cohorts page.
If you have a project that needs a structured sprint of real work — a research task, a scraping project, a batch of editorial content, a data enrichment job — we can run a cohort around it. You brief the project; we recruit, mentor, and deliver. Members receive a stipend (funded by you); you get the work and first dibs on hiring the people who did it.
This model exists elsewhere (Herizon’s femcode collective is the closest reference point) and we’re open to running a sponsored cohort from Cohort 4 or 5 onwards once the standard cohort model is bedded in. If you’re interested, get in touch early — these take lead time to set up properly.
Email us with what you’re looking for — role, skills, timeline. We’ll tell you honestly whether any current or upcoming graduates match, and connect you directly.
hello@theacademy.ie →Or browse the graduates wall and reach out to individuals directly via their reference page.
Cohort 1 closes in approximately 6 weeks from the kickoff date. The first verified, referenced graduates will be available to hire from that point.
Reference letters are co-signed by Built In Ireland and Raven Design. Questions about the reference format: see the FAQ.