There are more stories being written every single day about colleges not properly preparing their students for the real world. The sentiment isn’t just coming from employers; students feel the same way. The skills they learn while earning their 4 year degrees at colleges and universities are simply not what employers need immediately upon graduation.
Today, according to a White House report published earlier this year, 545,000 IT jobs went unfilled in the United States because of a lack of qualified professionals to fill those positions. Combined with the fact that, according to BLS.gov, the job outlook for software developers is expected to grow 22% through 2022, and you see the problem that rapidly emerges.
In direct response to this rising problem, there has to be something to fill the void.
Coding bootcamps are doing just that for the computer science and information technology industries. While the 4 year degree isn’t necessarily an antiquated vestige of coding and information technology’s past, the winds of change are blowing dangerously fast, and we’re all in danger of not keeping up. New skills and proficiencies are required to be effective in the contemporary workplace, the needs of employers and consumers are changing, and for people entering the workforce fresh out of school, they’re often left ill-equipped to hit the ground running.
Enrollment is up
According to CourseReport.com, an online resource dedicated to providing information about coding bootcamps, in 2015, the overall coding bootcamp market will grow by 2.4x, and is estimated to graduate 16,056 new coders, up from 6,740 in 2014. Projected out, this would equate to an estimated year over year growth of 11%
By comparison, there were approximately 48,700 undergraduate computer science students who who graduated from accredited universities and colleges in the United States in 2014.
What’s more, in 2011 fewer than 100 people on LinkedIn noted they had graduated from a coding bootcamp. Only 3 years later, in 2014, over 8,000 people communicated via the popular professional social networking site that they had graduated from a coding bootcamp. That’s a 987% increase in only 3 years.
Jobs are available
According to a recent article from infoworld, Shravan Goli, Dice.com’s president, an online job search website, over 16,000 position for Java developers are available at any given time.
“Java was named one of the Top 10 skills hiring managers search for when in the market for cloud candidates, according to our November report,” said Goli. “And considering it’s a basis for so many open source projects, demand for tech pros with this programming language [skill] doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.”
The bottom line is, a coding bootcamp isn’t just a romantic notion stemming from silicon valley anymore, its now a viable, mainstream way for individuals to get the skills they need to succeed in today’s fast moving, highly competitive world of high tech.
Apply to Zip Code Wilmington’s January 2016 cohort here.
