Dev Bootcamp Starts First Cohort in Austin

Dev Bootcamp, the original immersive coding bootcamp, is coming to Austin. Applications are now open for the first class (or cohort) of the 19-week program (nine weeks part-time online, nine weeks full-time immersive and one week of intensive career training) that begins on May 2. The onsite portion of the training will begin on July 11 at 1705 Guadalupe Street.

Dev Bootcamp provides students with a strong coding foundation in languages and frameworks such as JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, HTML/CSS and Ruby, among others, as well as communication skills that improve team-based success in the workplace. With campuses across the U.S. – San Francisco, New York, Chicago, San Diego and Seattle – Austin is the next obvious choice to help fill the talent pipeline for a region with a growing number of tech companies.

Media research conducted in early 2016 found a persistent migration of Bay Area-based companies to Texas, particularly the Austin region. Along with tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox and Oracle — which all built or expanded into Austin in the past four years — nearly two dozen other companies also reportedly relocated to Texas or opened satellite offices there since 2014 to join existing major employers Dell, IBM, Flextronics and Samsung, among others. When asked why, many companies cited a desire to tap the pool of tech talent in order to grow their businesses along with a lower cost of energy, rent and overall cost of living as well as state tax incentives. For example, Oracle is building an Austin campus and seeks to increase its workforce in the city by 50 percent.

“The thriving tech community of Austin and the need for more skilled employees to fill the wealth of available developer positions is nothing new,” said Whitney O’Banner, Campus Director of Dev Bootcamp Austin. “What is more exciting is this city’s renewed interest in diversifying the tech pipeline and employing engineers with an array of backgrounds, ideas and perspectives. Dev Bootcamp’s focus on increasing accessibility to a top-notch coding education is the perfect fit for Austin. We believe that people from a variety of educational and professional backgrounds can learn to code, and we’ve designed our program and culture to support that theory.”

The program’s unique “whole-self” approach to learning ensures that students graduate with not only solid technical skills, but also interpersonal skills and abilities such as empathy, giving and receiving feedback and projecting leadership confidence, which enable them to work well in diverse teams. Multiple learning modalities such as lectures, pair programming, group projects and individual challenges are used to optimize student engagement.

From 2013-2014, Dev Bootcamp averaged approximately 17 percent women, trans and non-binary students across its locations. In 2015, the same student population grew to nearly 33 percent (compared to 18 percent of graduates who are women in a typical four-year Computer Science program). Dev Bootcamp offers a scholarship to students who identify as a gender or racial minority who is underrepresented in technology, and the company most recently announced full-tuition scholarships for 20 people from underrepresented communities to attend the San Francisco program in conjunction with a donation from Facebook.

Since the first class in 2012, Dev Bootcamp’s graduates have created successful tech careers as a result of the program’s unique curriculum, including a number of alumni working in the Austin area. The bootcamp combines rigorous project work—using languages and frameworks most common in today’s job market—with soft skills and metacognitive training needed to transition successfully into almost any engineering team as a software developer.

“My time developing software at Dev Bootcamp NYC only fueled my love of learning that has led me down various paths as an IT business analyst, writer and now a developer,” said Michelle Chu, client success engineer at Umbel, headquartered in Austin. “I like being encouraged to ask a lot of questions and collaborate creativity, which made Dev Bootcamp the obvious bootcamp choice for me. Today, I am applying and integrating the coding skills and empathy training I learned in the program with skills I acquired from my previous professional life, and I’m excited that the aspiring coders of Austin will have the same opportunity.”

Dev Bootcamp has graduated more than 2,100 students since it was founded in 2012, making it one of the largest bootcamps of its kind. After graduation, Dev Bootcamp focuses on maintaining engagement with its graduates through its active alumni community, inviting many alumni to engage as coaches and mentors for new students, celebrating new jobs that graduates land after the program and offering perks like tickets to events and conferences.

For more information about Dev Bootcamp’s expansion to Austin, contact Chris Nishimura at chris.nishimura@devbootcamp.com. To apply for the inaugural Austin cohort, visit our location page.

About Dev Bootcamp

Dev Bootcamp pioneered the short-term, immersive developer bootcamp, a model that transforms beginners into highly employable web developers in a matter of months. The 18-week curriculum, and one week of career training, teaches the technical skills people need to work as a web developer, but also the interpersonal skills that are critical to working in dynamic, cross-functional engineering teams. With more than 2,100 graduates to date, and locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Austin and soon D.C., Dev Bootcamp continues to lead the industry through innovation and expansion. Dev Bootcamp is owned by Kaplan, Inc. For more information, visit devbootcamp.com.

Note to editors: Kaplan is a subsidiary of The Graham Holdings Company (NYSE: GHC)

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