It’s a summer of big milestones at NSS. This month, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our founding and our first cohort of students. That’s right - it has been ten years since the first adults took the leap of faith to try to break into a tech career via this unproven “coding bootcamp thing”. Ten years of ever-increasing numbers of graduates feeding the growth - slow at first, explosive more recently - of our local tech economy. Ten years of building more skill pathways and more bridges to employers that help motivated adults find their first jobs using their tech skills.
Later this summer, in September actually, we will achieve two more big milestones and they will come within a few days of each other. One September milestone is the graduation of the 100th cohort from NSS. The 100th cohort will be the 17th graduating cohort from our part-time (evening) Web Development Bootcamp, which is one of now eight career launch programs at NSS - seven we run out of NSS and one where we partner with other community agencies. 100 is such a nice, big, round number - it just feels like a major milestone doesn’t it?
The other major September milestone - and this really is the biggie, the capstone on this whole year of milestones - is the graduation of the 2000th student from Nashville Software School. Two thousand adults who successfully completed training programs at NSS - that seems like such a huge number. 2000 people who put their trust in NSS to help them learn skills that they could use to launch a new career. 2000 people who found a pathway to a career (not just a series of jobs), a pathway to more rewarding and engaging work, and/or a pathway to a more secure economic future for themselves and their families.
2000 graduates is the milestone that, at least for me, sums up what NSS is all about. It’s why we exist. It’s about people. It’s about community. It’s about some of us in the community finding a creative way to help other people in the community achieve their goals for themselves and their families. It’s about giving a hand-up to motivated, capable adults who just need another chance. It’s about our students putting in the effort to learn a new skill. It’s about our staff and instructors who give of themselves to support our students. It’s about our community partners who help deserving adults find their way to NSS or who help graduates get connected to good jobs. It’s about our employers hiring and growing these graduates. It’s about the tech community welcoming our students and graduates to events, gatherings, and jobs as peers and colleagues.
Between now and those September milestones, we’ll be sharing more blog posts in this 10 Years | 2000 Journeys series. Just as we did for our fifth anniversary, we’ll take a look back at major events and trends and changes that have happened at NSS in response to changes in the local tech community, the economy, and as a result of opportunities that have been presented to us. We’ll also look ahead at the next few years and how we think changes will continue to unfold in the tech world and in our community and how NSS is thinking about how we’ll need to change to accommodate and take advantage of emerging trends. But most of all, we’ll celebrate the 2000 NSS graduates and the impact they individually and collectively have had and will continue to have on the local tech economy and the broader Nashville community.
This year in addition to the blog posts we are also producing a series of podcasts that looks at the growth of the tech community in Nashville during the past 10 years and what the next 10 years might bring. You can listen to the first two episodes now and episode 3 will be released later this week. Listen now on SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts