Learn to Code, Double Your Salary

From CNN Money:

Coding Dojo, a coding bootcamp founded in 2012, released a report Tuesday, which found that 56.5% of its graduates earned less than $35,000 before enrolling. After completing the 14-week course, graduates make an average of $72,221.

Mila Wilkinson graduated from Coding Dojo’s 14-week program in October 2015. Before that she was testing products at companies like Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) and Amazon (AMZN, Tech30), but she wanted to learn how to actually make them.

After graduating, she got a job in web support at Sinclair Digital — it came with a $20,000 salary bump.

“I loved it and I hated it,” Wilkinson, 28, said of Coding Dojo. “You’re put in an environment that, for a lot of people, is unknown. It was just an intense learning environment, but I loved it because you’re surrounded by people who want to learn the same things as you.”

At her new job, Wilkinson isn’t writing much code, but she says she plans to be a UX developer, developing products and coding every day. Like other students, she’s facing a bias against coding graduates, who are often thought to be less skilled than those who pursue a traditional education. The classes aren’t as comprehensive as multi-year computer science programs, so employers sometimes assume bootcamp graduates aren’t prepared for development environments.

In the era of skyrocketing college tuition with what is often an awful return on investment, this may be the future. This is trade school with a 21st-century twist. It may be frowned upon by some, but it’s filling a need for both employees and employers:

Over 1,000 students have graduated from Coding Dojo’s on-site programs in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and over 19,000 have taken classes virtually. Coding Dojo said 77% of its grads land a tech job within three months of finishing the program (and 97% within six months).

It’s just one of more than 90 bootcamps in the U.S. and Canada, which are expected to graduate 17,966 students this year, according to Course Report.

The demand is largely due to the fact that there’s an abundance of coding jobs — 500,000 in the U.S. right now. And those roles are expected to grow at twice the rate of other jobs.

City University of New York has partnered with a tech-talent development company to offer free coding bootcamps for it graduates, which indicates that intensive training is more relevant to the job than what may be offered in a traditional degree.