When we launched Wild Code School late in 2019 with our partners Dress For Success Dublin, we received a huge amount of interest from people wanting to retrain as a web developer. However, there was a major hurdle we came across in that it is very hard for people to quit work and do a full time course. As a result, we wanted to develop the best part time course on the market to help people become coders, and we think we may just have done that…..
A format created based on people’s feedback
Once the decision to develop a part time course was taken, it was important we developed a course that worked. The only way to do this was to speak with two sets of stakeholders to understand this.
So the first group of people we spoke with was past part time students. We wanted to gather as much feedback from this group to see what worked, what did not work and why. Here is what we learnt from students:
- 10 months is a long time for a part time course
- Backend takes a long time to see results compared to frontend where it is almost immediate. Students found the frontend to be more inspiring
We also wanted to understand what companies wanted from our students, and to see what was key for them. On speaking with some key partners and industry in general we learnt:
- The majority of entry level roles were for front end web developers (and this was confirmed when we researched jobs on LinkedIn)
- React is the prefered language
We listened and created
So taking the info we garnered from both past students and industry we set about creating a brand new part time course.
The challenge -> ensure we had all the required elements companies were looking for in a more favourable set up for the students.
As a result:
- 5 month part time course
- Focused on front end web development and React
- Intro to Node.js (backend)
- Focus on all the required skills that companies require for entry level roles
- Increasing soft skills training
The course is now accepting applications and you can download the brochure here for more info.
The course is due to start after Easter on 20th April 2020 and we also decided to give the month of August off (according to feedback) so it will finish on 3rd October 2020.
The time is now
If you feel stuck in a rut, or you are worried that your job will be gone in the future or traditional methods of education don’t work for you, you can do something about it. I am speaking with companies everyday and it's clear, there are just not enough people available to fill all the roles that are currently open, never mind the proposed roles coming over the next few years. There seems to be no let up in the desire and need for developers, so the quicker you make the decision to move the better it will be for your long term opportunities...
