Will Coding Bootcamp Guarantee You a Job?

image: Criterion Classified Ads / Media Innovation by Jota Julian Gutierrez

One of the reasons why someone takes a coding bootcamp is to find a developer’s job after that. It could be a complete career change or mild migration from some other software industry area. Actually, most of the students we have are moved by this reason. And of course we’ve got a lot of questions how does it work exactly. Especially with many code schools offering “job guarantee”. Let me explain how we handle that.

First thing first, what does it even mean — a “job guarantee”? It varies from school to school but generally speaking the approach is the same. Upon graduation a student has a list of checkboxes to check to be qualified for this “job guarantee” thing. For example, they have to provide evidence of applying for some specific number of jobs, they can’t refuse any incoming job interview offer from the hiring partners of the school and they can’t refuse any job offer for no reason, would it be salary level or particular area of dev activity offered. Simply put, they have to take what they are offered.

Now this approach is slightly flawed in my humble opinion. I strongly believe in freedom generally speaking and personal freedom of choice in particular. Applied to the coding bootcamps’ job support process it simply means that if one discovered passion for front-end they shouldn’t be forced into working with back-end just to qualify for the job placement. On top of that, what if you won’t like the proposed compensation package? Or the company’s environment? Or the location with 2-hour commute? With job guarantee you will still have to take it 😱

A lot of people ask us before signing up — do you guarantee that I will get a job after the bootcamp? Well, yes and no. What we can guarantee is that after finishing successfully our coding bootcamp you will be 100% employable as a junior developer. And the have a record history to prove that with our graduates working all other the world in all sorts of companies. You will be able to build any kind of web or mobile apps, pass the technical interviews for the junior positions and for sure get job interview invites from our partners. Oh, and once you will update your LinkedIn profile the recruiters will start getting in touch with you there as well.

And yet it is not a “job guarantee” unconditional promise. Why? Because first we do not know yet if you will finish bootcamp successfully. Successful outcome means different things for different students. Some of them are here just to upgrade their current skills and understand coding generally, some are leisure coders, some are project managers learning a new language to be able to talk to their developers team, some are product owners launching their startup and being four-hand Shivas in the beginning but not planning on becoming full-time coders. So apart from all that let’s see a student who is determined to become a professional coder and get full-time employment. So, what could go wrong?

Motivation/dedication. While as absurd as it sounds, sometimes it feels like signing up for the program is enough to get the job after. Well, it is not. Think about your gym membership — some of us are paying members going there once a month at best. Guilty as charged 🙋‍♀️. Will it make a professional athlete out of us? No. So working hard during the bootcamp is a must. It is a group effort there we put 100% of our effort in and the student does the same. In this case it will work.

Another catch is personality. We are all uniquely different human beings with different expectations and ways of living our lives. The job interviews are personal experience where you might not like the company you are being interviewed for or the opposite could happen. How can one state “job guarantee” for someone they have no idea about?

If your dream job is to code mobile games from your home and you’re being offered an onsite position in the accounting software development company will you be happy? Will you take it? But that’s how “job guarantee” works.

We do not want to be the ones to force someone to do what they do not want to do. What we want to do and what we actually do is train you and give you the skills needed to start a developer’s career. We will push you to the limits and always challenge you to do (and also a ToDo app of course 😹) more during the bootcamp so that by the end of it you will learn as much as you personally can and a little bit more of that.

And then here comes our job support process. How does it work? We help you to build a portfolios website (apart from all the course’s projects you will do), create the best possible CV, organise codebase and deploy projects. Once the bootcamp is over we send out your profile to our current hiring partners. To become a hiring partner a company sends us a request for the junior developers, then we clarify what level and what stack we teach to get a confirmation that yes, they need these kind of developers. This helps to exclude absurd situations when you go for a job interview for a JavaScript developer and being asked to complete a test in Java or PHP designed for a senior. They know what to expect and they are willing to hire! And after that the hiring partners are contacting you directly.

This proved to be much more efficient than having hiring days on campus (there are horrible stories about hiring days with just one or zero hiring companies coming to these days to complete disappointment of previously excited students).

So being said that, yes:

• all of the students who finished successfully and were looking for job are getting hired in 1–3 months after graduation;
• some of them got hired even before finishing the bootcamp;
• you will have to work hard to get to the employable level;
• you will get universal skills which allow you to find work in any part of the world;

It is scary sometimes to make a life-changing commitment and make a first step so any sort of “guarantee” probably helps. So listen out — we do guarantee that we will put all of our effort to help you succeed, let all of our hiring partners know how awesome you became after those 9 weeks of bootcamp and will support you through the interviews process however we can. And this is our “job guarantee”.

See you in school.

George