Go into any company and you’ll often find that the ‘summer lull’ is the quietest time of year. Desks are empty, the OOO’s are on, and nearly everyone is outside enjoying the summer sun. This is why summer is the ideal time to retrain into a new career. That is especially true when it comes to doing a coding bootcamp like Makers, where you proceed to the job-hunt only a few months after starting.
What makes summer a great time to retrain?
1. You’ll graduate in autumn, which is the best time of year to be looking for work.
When summer comes to an end, so too do the holidays. As soon as autumn rolls around, people start returning to work and figuring out what their teams need to look like going forwards. The demand for new joiners tends to rise as service businesses pick up pace after the slowness of summer.
Autumn also marks the start of the last financial quarter of the year. This is when companies typically ramp up their efforts to reach annual sales and company goals and maximise their remaining hiring budget. It’s their final chance to bring in additional staff before potential budget cuts open the new year.
Training at Makers over summer means that you finish the course in autumn — an ideal time to be job-hunting and introducing yourself to hiring managers.
2. Our 300+ hiring partners have dubbed Summer cohorts the ones to watch.
In the past, hiring partners have paid close attention to the summer cohorts, for the reasons listed above. The summer cohorts feature career changers who also prioritised learning to code above taking a summer holiday — demonstrating a perseverance and diligence that is highly valued by most employers.
Our hiring partners include Deloitte, the Financial Times, Depop, and numerous others. We also work with a number of smaller companies, and our graduates are highly encouraged to look for jobs outside of our current hiring partners. When it comes to finding a job, we want to help in any way that we can, and we have built an extensive alumni network for all graduates.
You can read more here about Josh Ng’s experience — he trained at Makers during the summer of 2020 then applied for the role of Associate Test Automation Engineer at Just Eat about a week or two after he graduated from the course. He got told he got the job only two hours after his final interview!
3. Hiring trends are changing as we come out of the pandemic.
The pandemic has brought all kinds of transition and transformations, and the world of careers is no exception. This McKinsey report on the future of work shows that demand for workers in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) is only set to increase.
There are post-Covid workforce trends such as accelerated automation and accelerated e-commerce, as well as “the growing need for people who can create, deploy, and maintain new technologies.”
From our experiences, we’ve seen that employers are not only looking for people who know how to code. They are looking for people who can code well and also have the communication and emotional skills gained from previous career experience, who can therefore hit the ground running in a new team and start adding value from day one.
4. Lower stress levels mean it is easier to retain new information.
Makers is an intense course. There are weekend challenges designed to help students absorb the previous week’s topic, and sometimes this means coding seven days a week. Students not only learn the basic logic of programming but also they learn how to learn. There is a push towards independent study and learning from peers, instead of relying on coaches.
This means students need to be able to retain large amounts of information in a condensed space of time. This is much easier to do when your stress levels are lower, which is often the case over the summer months. It makes summer a great time to let go of old routines and try out new approaches to work.
