We are pleased to announce that we are increasing the number of part-time Web Development bootcamps from two to three in 2020, allowing us to accommodate an additional 25 to 30 students. For the past four years, we have offered two evening part-time Web Development bootcamps but with the rapid growth in the tech job market in Nashville we have decided that it’s time for us to expand and accommodate more students. Also, for the first time, we will be offering Python with Django in the part-time Web Development Bootcamp. To accommodate the additional class, we are adjusting the start dates for the evening bootcamps to line up with the start of calendar quarters.
We plan to start the three part-time Web Development bootcamps next year at the beginning of January, April, and July. Applications are currently open for the January and April classes. We expect to open applications for the July cohort in early January.
We have traditionally only offered C#/.NET as the server-side technology stack in our part-time evening Web Development Bootcamp. The addition of a third class gives us the ability to offer another server-side technology stack to evening students. Two of the evening bootcamps - January and July - will still be C#/.NET. The third bootcamp starting in April will teach Python/Django as the server-side technology.
The reason for adding another evening class is easy - we believe that the growth in demand for junior software talent in Nashville creates the need for additional supply of career-ready talent. Rather than add more full-time day programs as we did last year, we decided to meet the demand from applicants that need to retain their day job yet still want to prepare for a career shift into software development.
For the past couple of years we have had more than enough student demand for evening bootcamps to fill additional classes; however, as we’ve noted here on our blog in the past, we only add classes when we’re confident that the growth in the greater Nashville job market is generating enough additional employer demand for junior software engineers to absorb the additional graduates from our programs. Trying to balance prospective student demand with employer demand has always been a challenge, since it means that we’ve had far more applicants wanting training than seats in classes, but we continue to believe there is no point in training people for jobs that don’t exist. The demand trend we’ve seen this year and what we can see going into 2020 and beyond have made us comfortable that employer demand will exist for at least one additional cohort of graduates in 2020. Plus, the adjustments to our evening program schedule opens up the possibility of easily adding another evening bootcamp starting in October once we see additional employer demand.
