You’re considering enrolling in a coding bootcamp, but let’s be frank: it can be intimidating. As a beginner, you know there is an entire world of programming concepts out there, as well as the vocabulary — words like React, debugging, Git, optimization, Babel, and so on — that you need to learn as you go. Pulling a new professional skill set from scratch is tough, but entirely doable with the right combination of effort, expertise, and support.

To start, let’s focus on what you, the student, can do to optimize for success. “Successful students are curious, relentless, and really efficient with their time,” Theresa Freet, program manager for Thinkful’s Full Time Web Development Bootcamp explained. “The best students are the ones spend most of their time writing code, rather than reading articles or watching tutorials. Practicing is the only way to get better at writing code, so the more that you do it the more natural it becomes.”

The best bootcamp courses emphasize practical coding. Ultimately, when hiring managers look at new developers, they want to see what you can build. The only sure-fire way to show what you can build is to show them what you have already built.

For Thinkful students, that means building capstone projects. “Your capstones are an opportunity to build a production app from scratch. Put the work in and cash in on that opportunity,” advises Derek Fogge, program manager for Flexible Web Development Bootcamp, “it showcases your ability to code. It also shows other skills that employers look for: creativity, the ability to see a project from concept to completion, and grit.”

Derek went on to explain that when a student approaches an employer with a portfolio of complete, functioning apps, it signals “this is a professional developer, not someone who is dabbling around with coding tutorials.” In other words, it’s someone an employer can hire.

Robert Wilson, Thinkful program manager, added that “putting a ton of inventiveness into your capstones will go a long way, but don’t let it take away your willingness to hear feedback. When your code gets reviewed by your personal mentor or another mentor assigned to help improve your portfolio, they’ll have criticism. Remember that it’s constructive, will help you become a better developer, and will be a standard practice once you’re working in the industry.”

The more people we talk to, the more we hear this sort of advice: be open and willing to hear how you can improve. Bootcamps such as Thinkful stock up on seasoned professionals to share their years of experience and wisdom with students — as a student, be sure to take advantage of this, not just in the course itself, but in the job search afterwards.

“In addition to being consistent and strategic with their job efforts, students need to be open to feedback, then put those lessons straight to use,” explained Stephanie Bermudez, Thinkful Career Services Manager, “you want to make sure to always put your best foot forward when you’re approaching hiring managers.”

As with capstone projects and learning to code, the job search takes effort and persistence. Liz Parsekian, Career Services Manager at Thinkful, discussed the importance of networking:

“Find the companies you're passionately interested in and learn what they're looking for in a hire. Research their culture, mission and stack. Find a developer who is happy to talk to you about how they got a job there and what they do. Can you make an app to impress them? Find a bug in their code? If you're junior, what the company wants to see most is that you don't get frustrated solving problems that may be over your head - and that you want to work there and do well.”

To sum up, succeeding as a Bootcamp student has a few keys: persistence, patience, and responsiveness to feedback. As Liz said, “when grads stay focused, keep programming, keep meeting their peers and take the advice of experts they succeed.”

After a year of student success with their Full Time Web Development Bootcamp, Thinkful is doubling down. Students asked for a more in-depth program and employers are always looking for graduates with a stronger grasp on key programming concepts, bigger projects with crucial technologies like React and Node, and more impressive portfolios.

We sat down with Bhaumik Patel, who is the Head of Full Time Bootcamp to hear about the additional topics Thinkful students will learn and how all of that will help Thinkful Bootcamp graduates stand out in the job market.

Your Full Time Web Development Bootcamp has been around for a year. How has it gone so far?

Oh man, it’s been great. If you look strictly at the end results, students have gotten placed in excellent companies, including Intel, R/GA, and Boeing, among many others. We’ve been incredibly excited to watch students who had never coded professionally before ramp up in just over 4 months to become web developers, landing the exact types of jobs they talked about in their onboarding calls.

We’ve been teaching web development online for several years now but weren’t sure we could create the type of social experience that students expect from in-person programs. Being able to watch students step out of their shell and form genuine friendships with other students has been just as special as the outcomes. Ben Young, a graduate, spoke in detail about how supportive the community was for him in a recent blog post highlighting his experience.

So we noticed that you’ve made some big new changes to the bootcamp recently, including extended the length of the bootcamp. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah! Essentially, it came down to two reasons: depth and getting ahead of industry demand. As many coding bootcamps are starting to realize, 12 weeks just isn’t enough to make someone a professional developer. While our bootcamp was already 17 weeks long, we’re adding 3 weeks to our existing 4 month bootcamp to raise the bar even higher for our graduates.

We’re spending two of those weeks on the technical side, allowing students to spend more time on React, architectural design patterns, and SQL. We’ll also be able to cover important topics like such as web performance and dev ops to help our graduates hit the job running. We’ll also spend more time covering responsive design and CSS preprocessors like LESS & SASS. While you don’t need to be a professional designer, you do need to build an impressive portfolio to get you hired in the first place. Frankly, your users’ first impression of an app can make or break it, and design matters.

We’re also adding a new structured week of career prep before students kick off their job search with daily support from a career coach in the final weeks of the program. Before graduation, you’ll have polished resume, professional LinkedIn, compelling portfolio, and a personalized strategy for attacking the job search. We won’t stop until you negotiate your final job offer.

All of this sounds intense. How do students prepare for Thinkful’s bootcamp — what’s the application process? Can you give our readers some tips?

Thinkful’s mission is to be open to anyone who wants to learn. We don’t have an application process in which we pore over your résumé and then self-select for people who have been engineers, majored in computer science but are looking to add web development to their toolkit, or people with STEM backgrounds.

However, it’s important that our students can commit to the intensive pace of the program, are able to work well with each other, and are passionate about programming. To meet those goals and also let our students get a taste of the Thinkful experience, we’ve developed a 3 week prep course where you get started with frontend programming (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), attend weekly office hours (there 40 hours of them available each week), and a personal mentor to meet with 3x/week.

After you’re done with this content, you’ll have have a technical evaluation with a mentor to assess your comprehension. As an applicant, we’re not trying to squeeze you into a painful situation that sets you up to fail. If you can pass the tech evaluation and demonstrate that you can do the work, you’re most of the way there. Last up is a final evaluation, where you meet with our program manager to make the final decision. We try to create classes of students who will work well together, with positive attitudes and a growth mindset. Make sure you’re ready to learn and collaborate and you’ll get past this stage as well.

As an online school, do people spend time learning on their own? What’s different about Thinkful?

In short, as a Thinkful student, you have more support than in any other bootcamp program — online or offline. While brick-and-mortar schools need to pour tens of thousands of dollars into monthly rent at each of their locations, we put all of those resources into making sure that students are surrounded by expert support around the clock.

You wake up in the morning, do a little reading, and then join your workshop. Each workshop is run by a lead instructor — either Joe, Chris, or Tauhida — all of whom have decades of experience building software, leading teams, and teaching students. After learning the day’s lessons, you jump right into applying new concepts with practical coding.

That takes the form of pair programming. You team up with a different classmate each day, so you get used to working with a range of personalities. As you work, two TAs (who are expert mentors themselves) will be making rounds to different video rooms, so that you never have to wait if you and your pair get stuck on a given problem.

Every evening, you also meet 1-on-1 with your expert mentor. Whenever you’re stuck on a problem, need help planning out your project, or want to firm up your understanding of a programming concept, your mentor is there to work directly with you. Having that 1-on-1 attention is crucial. Nothing beats having someone who you get to know over the course of a 5 month program, who understands your thought processes and goals, working with you every day to help mold you into a professional web developer.

In addition to from the structured support time that is pre-planned into the Bootcamp, students can also attend Q&A sessions. Each week, mentors host over 40 hours worth of sessions, and as a student, you can join any of them. Many students jump into these when they need an answer right away, though you can join one even if you just want to hear how a different developer explains the way they solve a particular problem.

Last up is our Slack community. At any given time, dozens of mentors and hundreds students are online. Usually, it doesn’t take long to get your questions answered on there, whether you’re trying to set up a new development environment or just get some design feedback. That said, it’s just as valuable for you to build your network of experienced and budding developers.

We’ve seen a lot of bootcamps switching to full stack JavaScript. You’ve been at that for over a year — what drove Thinkful to teach that stack?

Two reasons: learning experience and market demand.

To be brief, there’s a benefit to learning one language across the entire stack. You don’t need to master multiple syntaxes in order to build an app. Rather, you can focus on learning to think like an engineer and understanding the principles behind what makes programs work. Full-stack JavaScript allows you to do that.

From a jobs market standpoint, students need to be armed with the best skillset to land them jobs. If you look at the market now, particularly since the rise of Node.js, it’s obvious that the trend has been towards JavaScript. That’s amplified by robust frameworks on the frontend — Angular used to dominate, but now React is at the forefront of growth in the market, so that’s what we teach.

As we looked around at the market, we saw more and more companies moving towards JavaScript on the backend. That’s also where web technology was going. I can send you to a dozen different places, but nothing illustrates the point better than StackOverflow’s 2016 Developer Survey — JS has big wins in popularity, and some of its closest ‘competitors’ in the survey are frameworks written in JavaScript.

Of course, we don’t have something against Ruby on Rails or other ways of building web apps. Some of our students have learned Rails during the Bootcamp’s Flex Week — a one-week period where you step out of the main stack to practice learning a new skill, as you doubtless will need to at several points in your career as a developer, given how fast the industry changes. Others have learned Python for data visualization and built mobile apps in Swift or React Native.

All of these skills might be valuable to learn at some point in your career as a developer. To get you started, however, we focus on full-stack JavaScript to help you learn quickly and put you in the best position possible to land your first job as a web developer.

Sounds like job-readiness is baked into the curriculum from the outset. How else are Thinkful students prepared for the job search after they graduate?

Career Services are a huge part of student success, I’m glad you brought that up. You start prepping for the job search before you even graduate. As a student, As a student, you'll have 4 mock interviews through the course, performed by a Thinkful mentor to practice technical, soft skill, and “culture fit” questions. You’ll start working on your portfolio in the first half of the bootcamp after learning more about UI and responsive design. As you build capstone projects to add your portfolio, you’ll have thorough design and code reviews from Thinkful mentors to make sure your portfolio projects are impressive for recruiters and technical employees alike (you’ll spend significant time revamping your GitHub profile and READMEs).

Once you graduate, the job hunt ramps up in full. Thinkful’s Career Services team has connections with employers around the country, and is constantly seeking out hiring managers to introduce graduates to. You’ll get help writing your résumé, picking out job opportunities, and crafting each application.

The process is highly personalized, just like every aspect of a Thinkful education. As a student, you work 1-on-1 with your career coach. Together, as you apply for the best opportunities, your coach guides you through the process, giving you pointers on how to ace interviews. When you get your job offers, your career coach is also on hand to give you salary negotiation advice.

Speaking of job offers, you’re one of a few bootcamps to offer a job guarantee. Why?

The vast majority of students succeed. Our most recent Bootcamp Jobs Report shows 94% of graduates get hired as web developers and see an average salary increase of $18,091. That simplifies the decision-making for us.

Some students might love your program, but don’t want to quit their job. Does your Flexible Web Development Bootcamp make the same promise?

Yes! Flexible Web Development Bootcamp also features a job guarantee. While it’s structured very differently — students take the course part-time, so most students learn while holding a job — it does teach you everything you need to land your first job as a web developer. Benjy, our Education Advisor, can help you get started.

Anything else?

Since we’re in mid-March today, I want to remind everyone that our next cohort begins on May 8th and runs for 5 months. To be eligible for that cohort, you need to start the Prep Course no later than April 10th. I’d be happy to answer and questions, just email me at bhaumik@thinkful.com or schedule a call with me.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us about Full Time Web Development Bootcamp, Bhaumik.

Most students enroll in coding bootcamps to get a job as a developer. Learning to code, however, is only half the battle. Everyone who has spent time searching for a job knows that the process of getting hired can be long and sometimes discouraging. Thinkful’s Career Services are built to address that problem by giving students the skills and support necessary to conduct an organized, successful job hunt.

“1-on-1 support is the keystone of a Thinkful education — whether it’s learning web development with a mentor or planning out your job hunt with your career coach, you always know someone has your back,” Stephanie Bermudez, Career Services Manager at Thinkful, explains. “Graduates meet directly with their career coach for a 1-on-1 session weekly, and can join in on a daily standup with Liz and me. Together, you and your career coach craft your plan to make sure you have a healthy funnel of job prospects, and make sure you stay on track to land a job as soon as possible.”

Such intensive 1-on-1 support yields strong results. As of the end of January 2017, Thinkful’s independently audited jobs report showed that 94% of graduates were hired as full-time developers within 6 months of graduating the course. But how do students who were beginners only a handful of months ago ramp up so quickly to be effective web developers and job hunters?

“Career prep, in order to be successful, needs to start well before graduation. Students build capstone projects, which they can add to their professional portfolio,” Liz Parsekian, Career Services Manager at Thinkful, says. “Combine that with mock interviews, design reviews, and constant mentor support throughout the course itself. We make sure that our students have all of the hard skills and soft skills needed to stand out in today’s competitive environment.”

Indeed, a significant handful of Thinkful’s students are hired before they complete the coursework and enter the full-on job search. According to their January jobs report, over 40% of Web Development Bootcamp students actually find a job before their official graduation date. Doubtlessly, this number is fueled at least in part by strong professional capstone projects and career advice baked into the course.

Mock interviews, in particular, are one such piece of career advice that pushes students to demonstrate their understanding verbally. Many applicants can build production apps, but companies are also looking for team members who can clearly communicate how an app works, why certain engineering decisions were made instead of others, and in many cases, to explain why a given product is important.
“When students are given the chance to practice articulating these aspects of their work,” Stephanie added, “they feel much more comfortable in real interviews. That kind of confidence is make-or-break when it comes to leaving a great impression on a hiring manager.”

Thinkful also focuses on several other ways to build student relationships with hiring managers, including making direct introductions between students and companies in their area. Such warm introductions not only break the ice for students to begin their application process on a strong footing, they also provide prospective employers with the assurance that a credible institution is putting their reputation behind an applicant. While there is never a guarantee that a given employer will hire any candidate, this is a strong benefit for Thinkful graduates.

“We also see several companies who have hired Thinkful graduates return to us, asking us if we have any new developers looking to work with them,” Liz offers, “we work hard to build these relationships, but in some cases, the credit belongs to our graduates. When they impress an employer to the point that a hiring manager says ‘I want someone else with that education,’ the graduate definitely deserves a lot of credit for doing great work.”

With all of the connections and training in place, Thinkful also explained that a consistent process is necessary for a successful job hunt. “Job hunts are stressful, so one of our aims is to make that easier on students. Having that 1-on-1 attention with a career coach who can empathize with you is crucial,” Liz explains, “but when you have your session each week with your career coach, it’s also about establishing a drumbeat of progress.”

Thinkful pushes students to constantly make incremental progress towards a goal. “It’s a lot like agile processes students are likely to use in the workplace,” Stephanie adds, “one alumnus actually reached out and told us that he was more comfortable working in a remote job that used agile processes, since he got so accustomed to it with his career prep standups. Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about in a nutshell: Helping you land your first job as a web developer and preparing you to excel once you’re there.”

Find out more about Thinkful’s Career Prep, 1-on-1 mentor-ship, and explore student capstones!

Building on student success in Web Development Bootcamp, Thinkful is launching its new Data Science Bootcamp. The course is fully online and flexible — students can learn from wherever they are, at whichever times of day work best for them.

The course dives deep into Python and its mathematical toolset, statistical analysis, and big data techniques including machine learning. By the time a student graduates, they will have the full skillset of a professional data scientist.

Data science means different things to different people. For a marketer, it might entail using scripts and statistics to determine how customers buy a product. For an epidemiologist, it might mean using visualization libraries to trace the outbreak of a disease back to its source. For everyone, however, data science is a robust set of skills that allows you to crunch massive amounts of information and draw out useful, intelligent conclusions.

To help you learn that skillset, Thinkful’s Data Science Bootcamp offers unprecedented student support. Every student works 1-on-1 with an expert mentor, who is a professional data scientist, and meets with them three times a week for one-hour sessions. Working 1-on-1 was shown as early as 1984 to be significantly more effective than learning in a classroom — landmark education studies have shown that mentored students perform better than 98% of traditional classroom students.

Building on top of the strong foundation of 1-on-1 mentor-ship, Thinkful offers around-the-clock expert support. With over 40 hours of mentor-hosted Q&A sessions and workshops each week, students can drop in and ask an industry expert rather than waiting for a classroom to open to get answers.

Thinkful’s deeply personalized approach allows students to customize the course to their needs. For example, if a student is an expert in statistics, they can skip that section of the curriculum and instead work with they mentor to focus fully on other topics, such as Python and machine learning. Since Data Science Bootcamp works on monthly payments, students are not locked in for 6 months — finishing early means paying less.

As a recipient of SwitchUp’s Best Bootcamp Award, Thinkful has a proven track record. The Data Science course builds on that track record: it was written in collaboration between data scientists from Uber, the Max Planck Institute, and Thinkful. Further, with past successes such as Web Development Bootcamp program, students have strong evidence to expect similar success with Thinkful’s Flexible Data Science Bootcamp.

Ready to transition your career into Data Science? Schedule a call to learn more about Thinkful's Flexible Data Science Course!