Like Kosinska, Ahmed Hassan, the 30-year-old Norwegian co-founder and manager of Amesto Aces, is passionate about accumulating knowledge.

His father, an immigrant from Somalia, counselled him to go into accounting because it’s the base skill of business, and his degree has proven useful. But he has never stopped educating himself. As a serial entrepreneur, he’s had to learn how to run different kinds of businesses from scratch three times.

“Learning is actually my favorite activity, not only on the professional spectrum, but also learning for fun,” he says. “I love to learn.”

Hassan, with his brother Abukar Hassan, 27, and a friend, Liban Salad, 29, had already built two successful social innovation businesses in the past few years – a security firm that hired young unemployed immigrants to patrol their neighborhoods and a public relations firm that specializes in reaching immigrant communities.

In March 2021, Hassan got an interesting call from Ariane Spandow, the chairwoman of the board of Amesto Group, a Nordic group founded by a Norwegian family that provides solutions in technology, software, outsourcing and staffing. It is also a company that nurtures “intrapreneurs,” founders of innovative companies that operate under the Amesto umbrella. It was in this regard that she had an eye on Ahmed Hassan; she had read about the success of the other companies Hassan, his brother and Salad had built.

She was looking for a partner to build a tech-training company that would help put unemployed Norwegians back to work.

She had taken the reins of the family business that year and was instituting the “triple-bottom-line” model to measure the success of the executives at Amesto’s companies, including herself. Each company run by Amesto would need to show success in three areas: profit, people and planet.

For her, the idea of helping people find fulfilling careers after long-term unemployment, filling the tech-labor gap and saving the government money fit the ideals she was striving for.

“I heard about Ahmed, Abukar and Liban, and I thought they were really, really good candidates because they had managed to earn money from being social entrepreneurs,” she recalls.

“Ahmed and I ended up having a meeting running for two hours on Teams and we just really hit it off,” she says. “I asked him if they wanted to join Amesto and build Amesto Aces.

“And he said, ‘OK, I have to talk to the boys, give me an hour and I’ll call you back.’ And he called back later and said ‘Ariane, we’re in!’”

Hassan recalls telling her that he needed six months to learn how to run a tech-training company on the model that she was proposing and to wind down his other businesses. And she said he would need to have his first paying customer within that same six months.

Hassan, his brother and their friend Salad built a network, took trainings and made connections with companies, eventually including Microsoft, which became a partner in the program.

“We had our first client in four months,” Hassan says with a laugh. It was a major Norwegian bank that committed to taking a graduate of the program for a one-year contract.

Henriette Dolven is the education lead for Microsoft Norway, and she is one of the company’s leaders who supported the Amesto Aces program.

Seven Norwegian labor and trade organizations for the tech industry collaborated on a study on the need for tech labor skills in the country by 2030, she says. “It confirmed we needed 40,000 people for tech jobs by 2030, and it was clear there aren’t enough tech graduates to fill those positions,” she says.

Dolven said she and her colleagues had been looking for partners to help fill that labor gap when they heard about Amesto Aces.

She and her colleagues began meeting with Hassan and the other leaders of Aces to see how Microsoft could help.

“The first skilling program was on cybersecurity, and it was all based on Microsoft Learn, so the content was there,” she recalls. “But the Amesto Aces used their skills to give it structure, put the different kinds of learning modules together and combine with the social skilling they provide.”

In addition to training participants in particular kinds of developing and programming, Amesto Aces trains its students in “soft skills” – how to present themselves for work and how to be a good employee.

“For me it’s kind of building upon the Microsoft values of inclusiveness – being a part of something meaningful,” Dolven says.

Spandow says the program echoes the roots of the Amesto Group, which in its earliest version was founded by her grandmother after World War II, when she created a company that provided secretarial services to companies that were short on employees – introducing women to the labor force while filling a labor gap. “In a way Amesto Aces brings it full circle,” she says.

Since its beginning, the training program has had 61 participants, and 36 have completed all certifications. Seven are completing the course now, she says. The idea is that Amesto Aces outsources their labor as contractors for one year with the hope that the company will then hire them full time.

Twelve other participants have gotten full-time jobs after fulfilling their contracts, she says. Six have found other IT jobs while doing the course, and nine have found non-IT jobs.

According to Hassan, nine participants were women, and 29 had immigrant backgrounds.

The goal is to expand the program to other Norwegian cities and eventually to the other Nordic countries, Spandow says.

Hassan says that Amesto Aces has so far faced two obstacles in placing its trainees. One is that it’s difficult for people who have been unemployed for a long time to find work – there’s a stigma attached.

He says one estimate puts the cost to the Norwegian government of a life-long unemployed person at 15.3 million kroner, or about 1.3 million euros. One of the goals of the company is to get people off unemployment; Hassan says his dream is at some point in the future to have saved the Norwegian government one billion kroner.

The other obstacle is discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or nationality – a survey found that people with non-Norwegian names had a much more difficult time getting a response to their CVs, and Muslim men in particular faced the highest bar: they had a 65 percent lower chance of getting a response.

Hassan says that most of the participants in the Amesto Aces program so far are white, and he says that one friend commented that it was the “very top of the pyramid of inclusion” that three Norwegian guys with African roots were helping white Norwegians find jobs. But the bottom line for him is character, not color, he says.

“We want people to get opportunities based on who they are as individuals, not being flagged because they have the wrong name,” he says.

Magdalena Kosinska’s boss at KLP, Thale Fonkalsrud, says that the philosophy of Amesto Aces aligns with the values at KLP, which manages the pension funds of more than 1 million people.

Fonkalsrud’s team manages a variety of IT tasks at KLP, including structuring the Microsoft 365 environment and building new tools to help employees in their jobs. “Our team’s motto is work smarter, not harder, so we’re always looking for things to automate,” she says.

Her team needed a developer who could handle a variety of different kinds of tasks. Cybersecurity – the subject of Kosinska’s Amesto Aces training – was not one of them. But the fact that Kosinska loved learning stuck in Fonkalsrud’s mind.

Kosinska’s creative approach to problem solving and her willingness to learn on the fly earned her the job – and the one-year extension to work as a contractor that will start in February, Fonkalsrud says, adding that she hopes to hire her permanently after that.

Fonkalsrud cited a particularly tricky task that Kosinska completed under deadline pressure in November 2024 as an example of why she has become a valued member of her team.

Kosinska built an add-on AI button in Word using Azure OpenAI Service that helps KLP staff summarize complex policy documents into emails and other communications.

“There were a lot of things we had to find out how to do, and she had to be inventive and do it under pressure,” Fonkalsrud says. “And Magdalena handled it perfectly.”

She says that in her view, the most important trait in an employee is the desire to learn, not what they already know or where they went to school.

“You need to never stop learning,” she says.