3 reasons why retraining at a coding bootcamp sets you up better for a career change
We’re launching a progressive and flexible option featuring a blend of in-person and remote learning, less screen time, and a broader range of group projects.
When you want to become a software developer, there are several options: You can do a computer science degree, you can apply for a job straight off the bat, or you can attend a coding bootcamp.
Retraining at a coding bootcamp sets you up better for a career change for several reasons:
- You’re likely to get hired (and progress) faster than if you learn entirely on your own;
- The intense environment catalyses your learning at a speed that is hard to replicate independently;
- The close ties to the tech industry mean that you’re likely to learn more relevant practices.
Businesses need a constant supply of technical talent, yet our education system doesn’t produce job-ready software developers. Here at Makers, we have a different approach to learning to code that leads to emotionally intelligent problem solvers. We use self-directed learning because we know that it increases your employability as a software engineer and helps you acquire the skills and behaviours that lead to success in your future career in tech.
This education philosophy is a massive part of what has made our training methods so successful. Between 1–2 years after finishing the course, 43% of our Makers graduates reach mid-level positions at their companies. Between 2–3 years, this increases to 70% at mid-level.
As a result of the way Makers teaches, when you leave the course, you’re more likely to:
- Hit the ground running and add value at a new job from day one, as you’re well-versed with being thrown into the deep end;
- Understand how to structure your workload — when to ask for help, and when to figure things out on your own;
- Have picked up the communication and collaboration skills that help you develop into a future engineering leader.
Our hiring partners are equally convinced of the Makers magic. As Mike Massari, Engineering Manager, Tray has said, “We noticed that many Makers graduates excel not only in the coding skills, but also have an excellent way of communicating the process that gets them to solve the challenges of the test. This type of communication, drive, and motivation is especially what we look for in junior candidates.”
“We find that the Makers graduates all hit the ground running and ask the right questions to get more involved with team participation and progress.” said Gary Stevens, Associate Director of Product Engineering, at comparethemarket.com.
So how will retraining at a coding bootcamp set you up better for your career change, exactly?
1. You’re likely to get hired (and progress) faster than if you learn entirely on your own.
After Makers had been open for only a few weeks, we described the original seeds of our teaching philosophy:
“It’s impossible to teach people how to code. It’s only possible to help them to learn to code.”
While the traditional classroom-based way of learning is what many of us might be familiar with when we think about education, self-led learning is different because of several features:
- Flexibility: Typically, learners are given the freedom to design and structure how they learn.
- Ownership: A core part of self-led learning is that people see learning as a tool to solve their real-life problems to excel in their professional objectives. It is based on intrinsic motivation to continue to grow professionally, with full ownership over progress.
- Empowerment: self-led learning means that learners are in the driver’s seat of their education journey, not the passenger’s seat. They steer their learning in the way they think is best, making their own decisions in their learning path.
We’ve trained over 2200 people to become junior software developers and connected them with top technology companies. We’ve seen that self-led learning can:
- Create independent, confident and resilient learners who are more autonomous in their day-to-day work;
- Increase engagement and productivity among junior developers by teaching them to take a more proactive approach to solve issues they might face;
- Help new joiners to overcome any imposter syndrome.
At Makers, we’re creating a different kind of software developer. We understand that modern software environments are collaborative and innovative, which is why we produce developers who can contribute to the team in a meaningful way.
To prepare you for working in a real tech team, the Makers curriculum is centred around learning to code by doing. We focus on Agile best practices like TDD and pair programming to set you up for the modern world of software engineering in the workplace. The holistic approach at Makers also gives you leadership skills in the years to come.
As the CEO of RVU (the company behind Uswitch and Confused.com), Tariq Syed has said: “I’ve been fortunate enough to personally interview all the Makers candidates we’ve hired, and I’m so impressed at the calibre of people and how they are so culturally aligned to how we work. I look forward to seeing them develop into future engineering leaders at RVU.”
2. The intense environment catalyses your learning at a speed that is hard to replicate independently.
We think education institutions should embed project-based learning and challenge-based development into their learning frameworks, which we practice here. Self-directed learning might be uncomfortable, but it’s also transformative, hence all the online reviews that describe this transformation.
Our goal-directed course is the critical mechanism for empowering you to be awesome when you start your first industry job. At Makers, you have goals to achieve, and there is a backbone structure that keeps things moving forward.
Before Makers, Dominic Vernon worked at a financial services company doing all the back office and administrative functions for companies listed on a stock exchange. He came to Makers in late 2017 and was hired into his first software role in May 2018.
“There is a very big difference in the way material is delivered here at Makers. At school, you’re given everything you need to know, and you’re almost taught to pass an exam. You’re not really learning in the same way at all,” he says. “At Makers, you’re encouraged to be active in your own learning rather than have it passively given to you.”
“With this style of learning, there isn’t really any measure of how you’re learning … an objective measure anyway. It’s very much ‘are you progressing’ rather than ‘have you reached a certain point’. To adjust, we personally set our own goals and move forward from that. You have to learn how to rely on yourself a lot more than usual.”
Dominic is now a Senior Software Engineering Consultant at Deloitte, who is one of our major hiring partners. The Head of Engineering at Deloitte Digital (Martin Aspeli) has said in the past: “Makers Academy is a Conveyor Belt of Awesome. There’s no other source of recruitment I’d put this much energy into.”
3. The close ties to the tech industry mean that you’re likely to learn more relevant practices.
From your first day, you’ll pair program and test-drive work. The course starts structured, and once each module’s outcomes are clear, we progressively allow students to follow their curiosities and make their own choices to fulfil requirements because learning happens best when they’re directing it.
This process helps you embed a goal-directed approach to learning in everything you do at Makers, and lets you be confident in learning new technologies in your next job. 51% of our alumni go on to work as full-stack developers while 20% become back-end developers. We’ve also trained DevOps specialists, mobile developers and data engineers.
When it comes to industry knowledge, our coaching team is made up of people who have actually worked as software engineers. Alice Lieutier started as a web developer in Buenos Aires before taking on several roles as a full-stack and front-end developer. She was a software engineer at Facebook in London for several years before joining SheCanCode as CTO. She is now Head of Coaching at Makers and is a big proponent of our educational approach.
“A self-led learner will ask questions and display a lot more autonomy to try and solve a problem,” Alice says. “That’s what more experienced engineers have learned to do in the tech industry. Self-led learners will exhibit behaviour more common with more experienced engineers: they will figure out what they’re missing and go ask for it.”
Maybe one of the best summaries of what sets self-learners apart was described by Dan Bass, Head of Product at Compare the Market:
“Makers Academy engineers can actually code: they’re able to approach a problem and build a quality solution. From our experience, they have all hit the ground running, where university grads can have a bigger learning curve because of the lecture environment. Makers engineers add value from day one because the course structure simulates the real world.”
Interested in training at Makers? Learn more here.
