| | Femke Buijs | After finishing the 13-week bootcamp at CoderSpace, I can safely advise anyone who considers this course to please avoid it. Their website promises a lot regarding the quality of the course, teachers, support and the learning curve, but these promises have not been met. I would like to focus on the two main aspects: quality of teaching and quality of career support.
Quality of teaching
According to their website, the course is taught by expert tutors. Although the lead instructor is indeed a good instructor with teaching experience, after approximately four weeks the teaching was given to an 18 year old teenager with no teaching experience. The lead instructor was often not in the room, leaving the young instructor with 13 students of different skill levels.
The result was that the lectures deteriorated. Most of the code felt untested since we sometimes spent an hour waiting for the instructor to find the errors in the code. There were often mistakes in the code, which is confusing, and some of the code examples were taken directly from the internet (including the errors) and prepared the day or days before (confirmed verbally by the trainer). The slides were uninformative and had errors in them, and the trainer often struggled to explain how the code works in the background, leaving us with a ‘that is just how it works’ or ‘It will make more sense later’ (it does not).
Finally, there has been no active checking on students in terms of their well-being, how they are performing and whether they understand the materials taught.
Quality of career support
Although on the website it shows an impressive network, we have barely seen any of this back into the course. The hiring partners often had no jobs available, offered apprenticeships (instead of junior roles), had no knowledge of what the students were doing or what was covered in the course, and use completely different programming languages than those taught in the course. The networking day was cancelled about 8 hours in advance and was replaced to a later date, where only one company showed up.
Very basic cv advice was given by an unqualified staff member with no experience in recruitment and with no experience in and zero knowledge about programming or IT, but who is supposed to be in charge of our hiring process.
Finally, the business partner who supposedly has a ‘hands on’ approach during our hiring period, was not around (I have never seen him) and was on a holiday during the hiring weeks of the course.
Besides these two points, not all topics in the curriculum were covered, the industry expert talks promoted on the website were not given, and some reviews, specifically in regards to the 13 week bootcamp, would appear to be fabricated considering I was part of the first cohort of its type run by Coder Space. What bothers me mainly is that feedback was given on multiple occasions, but not taken into account at any point. This makes me wonder whether the course will improve in the future. A refund has been requested by the students, but unfortunately has been rejected multiple times.
Although everyone has its own right to choose whether or not to do this course, I can only strongly advise not to do it. |
