I have been investigating how to get more talent in the tech industry for a while. There is not a lot of data on precisely how people select into tech and what might cause more people to train for in-demand jobs. Gordon Macrae, in his substack The View, has a recent relevant post Issue #9: Tracking 100 bootcamp graduates from 2015.
Gordon ran his own survey of 100 graduates of coding bootcamps. Coding bootcamps are a fascinating element that help fill in the skills gap. They are not well-understood, and we don’t have much publicly available data of the sort that helps researchers measure the outcomes of a traditional college education.
Here are some of his results from this preliminary survey:
Of this total, 68% of the graduates surveyed in 2022 were doing roles where the bootcamp was necessary for them to work in that role. What I found fascinating, though, was that this figure varied wildly depending on the bootcamp they attended.
On the lowest end, just 50% of graduates from Bootcamp A were doing jobs in 2022 that required having gone to a bootcamp. Conversely, 90% of Bootcamp D graduates were working in technical roles seven years after graduating.
What is more, the percentage of bootcamp graduates in technical roles at 7 years after graduation has gone done by 15%. The average immediately after graduation was 82% working in a technical role.
Other resources:
- Henry’s podcast on a bootcamp in West Virginia (qualitative research)
- My experiment on who will learn to code
There is more work to be done in this area.
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