Coding boot camps are booming these days, promising developers high-demand skills and job security. One study predicted the boot camp market will nearly triple this year.
According to Course Report’s 2014 Programming Bootcamp Survey, there will be an estimated 5,987 boot camp graduates in 2014, up from 2,178 in 2013.
(Related: Another way to learn coding: MOOCs)
“If you ask any of these boot camp founders, most of them will tell you the same thing: They started their boot camps because they had tried to hire developers and found an extreme shortage,” said Liz Eggleston, cofounder of Course Report.
Coding boot camps are programs, which may last weeks or months at a time, that train students in necessary coding skills employers are looking for to become full-time entry-level developers.
“Coding boot camps are a growing trend in education, and they’re offering a supplementary training, and in some cases [are an] alternative to a college degree,” said Eggleston. “Universities offer a lot to their students, but their primary interest is not always to get their graduates jobs.”
The concept of boot camps sounds appealing, but the price of learning is going to cost these future developers. The report reveals an average tuition price of US$9,900 for a 10-week course. Some boot camps do offer scholarships and payment plans.
When it comes to programming languages, the study found that Ruby is the most common taught language, as it is used in 57% of courses. Following Ruby are JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, .NET and PHP.
Other findings included an estimate of one boot camp graduate for every eight computer science graduates, and boot camps are estimated to pull in $59 million total tuition revenue for 2014.
What the results of this survey don’t show are the hiring rates from these boot camps and the starting salary of a boot camp graduate. Course Reports plans on tackling those demographics in its next coding boot camp report.
The full version of the report is available here.
