My 29 year old son with a Marketing degree, looking for a career change, paid for and completed a coding boot camp. It cost several thousand dollars. I think it was offered by “The Tech Academy.” Due to covid the course was online. Anyway, the school said successful completion would qualify one for an entry-level programming position. This far it has not.
Questions:
Are these coding boot camps worthwile? Worth the money? How much more beneficial for him would it be to return to college for another degree which would take another year and a half?
It depends. There were several excellent schools that taught specific programming to get people into the world of business programming. In the end you got a certificate. But you really learned how to code in the languages they taught. These were generally 6-9 months courses.
I’m not as sure about coding boot camps, but they sound like they’re probably not close to the same thing. I would need a little more info.
Breaking into software development right now is hard. A coding bootcamp certificate might get you past an HR screen at some companies, if their tech stack lines up with whatever the bootcamp taught. A degree might get past a few more HR screens. Once in the interview, nobody cares about credentials because applicants will be expected to demonstrate skills. As I understand the entry level field right now, he may need to apply for hundreds of jobs and endure dozens of interviews.
No physical interviews. He’s sent a lot of resumes, I think from leads from Linked In. For the most part no replies. A couple of entities offer “employment “ at $20.00/hr if he signs a one year contract. They cans send you anywhere. There’s also a penalty if you leave before the year. Sounds iffy to me.
Coding is pretty vague and boot-camps can be anything from 7-day deep dives to months-long full time classes. What did he learn, how long was the course, where is he looking for employment, etc?
It was a 6-month long program centered around HTML, CSS, Python, JavaScript and SQL. These along with some of the related frameworks and libraries such as Bootstrap, Django, React, etc. He would say that he has a fairly basic understanding of these languages and technologies but has a pretty decent portfolio and resume. Here’s his portfolio.
I took a look at his resume and it appears that he took the Python bootcamp. Python keeps increasing its market share, but a lot of it is due to data science, while his skills appear to be more around front-end development, and that combination is not as widely used as some others. His resume screams new coder and even his internship is through the bootcamp, which is obviously tricky, but he does have some marketable skills. To me the key is to get in the door somewhere. Would he be adverse to technical sales (which could utilize both sides of his resume) or perhaps something like a business analyst, which can be a starting point for all kinds of options? What about an actual internship?
What is his goal, other than career change? Does he want to create web-sites, mobile apps, games, data pipelines, something else entirely, or is he simply interested in a computer related job?