NSS has always believed that it’s not just about having the skills to do the job. You also need the skills to get the job. We regularly hear from graduates on LinkedIn, in reviews, and through personal messages how important our career development program was to securing their first tech job. The program has evolved and expanded over the years, even more so in the past two years in response to the weak job market. And with more opportunities coming in 2025, we wanted to share how our career development program prepares our graduates to get the job.

All NSS bootcamps include an integrated career development program. There are two major phases of that program: during the time students are attending the bootcamp, there is a job search preparation track that runs parallel to the technical training; after graduation the second phase of the career development encompasses job search support. We detail these phases below.

Preparing Students for their Job Search

The job search preparation track has been a part of the program since 2012. While in bootcamp, students learn best practices and receive personalized feedback on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. They attend a roundtable conversation with working tech professionals, including NSS alumni, to learn more about what it’s like to work as a software developer or data analyst. They participate in a mock interview, behavioral or technical, that is led by hiring managers and tech leaders who volunteer their time. These hiring managers and tech leaders also meet with graduates on their Demo Day to learn about their final capstone project.These and other activities also help students start to create a professional network in their new chosen career field. 

Hear from our Career Development team in this podcast from last year.

Post Graduation Support & Learning Opportunities

As students reach graduation, the second phase of our career development program begins. We’ve given them the tools to succeed and now our team is actively supporting them as they navigate job applications, interviews, and offers. We support our graduates in several ways. We share job leads that are sourced through our relationships with the community, alumni, and employers who contact us to share a job opening. Graduates also source their own leads through their network and job boards, but will continue to receive leads from NSS until they find their first job in tech. Our career development staff is available for consultation and advice. This can include a new resume review, interview preparation, and even offer negotiation advice. Once a graduate finds their first job in tech, we track outcomes in terms of placements, starting salaries, etc. so that we can share student outcomes with the community including prospective students.

We tell all of our students how important it is to keep coding after graduation. Unused skills grow rusty quickly. One way we encourage them to keep up with their skills is through lunch & learns. We originally added these workshops and job search support sessions for our Seekers to the career development program in 2020 when the job market slowed temporarily due to COVID-19. (Seekers are what we call our grads who are searching for their first job in tech.) So when we saw signs of another slow down in 2023, we brought them back. These lunch & learn sessions have been led by volunteer community members and NSS staff who’ve taught technical sessions or spoke on topics related to the job search. We’ve even had sessions with employers who had multiple job opportunities for NSS Seekers. In addition to the lunch & learn sessions, we have invited our graduates to fill open seats in our existing professional development courses, including Advanced SQL, at no cost to them.

We occasionally get asked if NSS offers a job guarantee or acts like a recruiting firm to find our graduates jobs. The answer is no. Our graduates do the hard work of navigating their job search, but as we mentioned above, they don’t have to do it alone. NSS does share the same goal as our graduates, to get their first job in tech, and we align ourselves with that goal through our Opportunity Tuition program, a risk-sharing program for those who are economically disadvantaged. 41% of our students in 2024 were a part of this program.

ProTech: Protecting the Tech Talent Pipeline

Even with all of this support, we were seeing Nashville lose valuable tech talent as a result of the weak tech job market. Each month, promising tech job seekers, not just NSS grads, abandon their job searches due to frustration over extended job searches and the need to support themselves and their families. And many of those who don’t abandon their job searches find it difficult to keep their skills sharp enough to compete and stand out in today’s job market. The loss of this talent isn’t just a loss for now, it’s a gap that will impact the community for years to come due to the smaller numbers of juniors available to grow into the senior talent of tomorrow. (And we will need that senior talent tomorrow - we’ll be talking about that more in the next couple of posts in this series.)

So, we asked ourselves, how can we do more? How can we help our Seekers and alumni and other local tech workers who have been laid off? Enter ProTech, NSS’s initiative to protect the tech talent pipeline. We announced ProTech in December and have been busy behind the scenes. We have been analyzing job postings for junior and mid-level talent in order to identify the most valuable skills and competencies in those job postings. We've also been getting feedback from employers on how they perceive the skills and competencies they need in their junior talent to have changed over the past couple of years. And we've gathered information from some of our seekers regarding any mismatches or gaps they have detected between their skills and what has come up in interviews. In addition, we brought on a new program manager, Jacob Goodman, to focus on continuing education needs. And finally, this week Jacob is sending surveys to all of our Seekers to ask them to rank a list of the potential continuing education topics we've already identified as well as asking them for items not on our list.

We expect to offer the first new continuing education classes in Q2 of this year. ProTech classes will be free to qualified individuals who have existing entry-level tech skills in software development, data analytics, or data science. The new professional development classes will provide more advanced technical skill training for job-ready adults, who are searching for their first tech job or are unemployed due to layoffs in the tech industry. Students must reside in Middle Tennessee, but do not need to be a graduate of NSS. You can learn more about ProTech here.

We’re excited to be adding more learning opportunities for our Seekers to help them to keep their skills fresh as they work hard on their job searches. We’re also supporting our Seekers indirectly by reducing competition for the lower levels of available jobs through reducing class sizes and reducing the number of graduating cohorts. You can read more about this in our 2024 Community Impact Report. If you would like to volunteer to help prepare our graduates for their job search (mock interviews, presenting on a technical or job search related topic, demo days), please reach out here. 

Next week, we’ll revisit the monthly job postings chart we shared in the 2024 Community Impact Report, break it down between software development and data analytics roles, and share an update on what our team is seeing in Q1 2025.