Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash
In a day and age where technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in our society, bootcamps have become the next hot trend.
Long gone are the days where growing adults feel the desire to go to medical school for a decade or more to become a doctor, all the while racking up tens or hundreds of thousands in debt.
No, in this day and age we have trained ourselves to hone in on what takes the absolute least amount of time and brings the largest rewards.
Of course, the rewards are usually thought of as more money or more freedom. Thus the concept of programming boot camps was born, and in just 7 years it has become over a $300 million industry in North America alone.
Having gone through a bootcamp myself, I can assuredly say that it has been one of the best decisions of my life to date.
But after coming out on the other end way ahead of where I thought I would be, I can’t help but notice some of my peers that attended along with me didn’t end up so well. Some of them were still looking for a job about 6 months later, some didn’t even finish the 3-month bootcamp in the first place.
I am not naïve enough to think that my class was the only bootcamp every where people gave up and dropped out. So I feel extremely confident making the following statement:
Bootcamps, and a career in the tech, are not for everybody.
It is very important to realize that while there are many positives to investing in a bootcamp and risking failure, there are also some strong negatives.
You need to sit down for a couple weeks or months and see if it is really a path you want to go down. Please take my advice and look into some free resources online (freecodecamp, udemy, Harvard CS50) and dive into programming to see if it is something that even remotely interests you.
If you don’t like it on day 1, that’s fine and even normal, but commit to just 30–60 minutes every day for 3–4 weeks of programming.
Generally, that is a good amount of time to figure out if you like doing something, and if you are committed to making time to program every day then there is a much higher chance you will commit to seeing a bootcamp through to the end.
Having said that, if you do some soul-searching and come to the realization that a bootcamp is a path you want to go down, allow me to be your guide. I will show you the way from my own personal experience, but it will be up to you to make your own decisions. My advice is only as good as my experience, so take it with a grain of salt.
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I have compiled a list of what I believe to be five of the most popular bootcamps, and graded them based on 5 criteria (and offered a couple questions you should dig deeper into):
Courses offered
These are the skills you will learn and the tracks you can take (Programming language, Engineering vs. Data Analysis vs. Digital Design etc.). Also, it would be wise to double check on what skills (programming languages) are in demand in the job market at your time of graduation. As of 2023, these are all good options to focus on.
Price
How much does it cost and are there any payment options? Is there a partnership with an institution to offer low interest loans?
Locations
Can you do classes remote or do you need to show up to a campus? Or can you do either?
Career Support
What kind of resources and guidance do you get after graduating to help you find a job? After all getting a new job is the entire point of doing a bootcamp! Be sure to check on how long you get support for. Is it for 1 month? 3 months? Until you find a job?
Length of time to complete
How long does it take and can you learn it on your own time?
Some factors will be more important to you than others, so feel free to skip around as you like. For me, I most heavily weighed price and cost, as I came from a career that didn’t leave me with a ton of money to throw around. It wasn’t an option for me to go for a very long period of time with no income.
Many of the bootcamps below offer courses that don’t include some kind of programming foundation, and for the purposes of this resource I have left them out.
If you find yourself browsing through one of them and are suddenly interested in digital marketing, please feel free to do your own research and branch out, not limiting yourself to just programming.
Also please note that as with any good business practice, the criteria I have listed and provided below can and probably will change over time with these different bootcamps. As of this writing, I have done my best to provide you with accurate information in which to base your decisions on. But like the savvy person you are, it is only normal that you will take what you see here and use it as a basis in which to go out and do your own research, to make your own decisions.
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General Assembly
Courses offered:
Full time courses:
Software Engineering immersive
User Experience Design Immersive (UX/DI)
Data Science immersive
Part time courses:
Python
UX Design
Data analytics
Data science
Visual Design
Front-End Web Development
JavaScript Development
React Development
Within the full-time courses, the skills you learn include but are not limited to what is included in the part time offerings.