Codecademy already makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to learn how to program a computer. Now, the New York City-based startup wants to make it just as simple for this new generation of coders to find jobs, as well.
On Friday, the company announced the launch of a new workforce development initiative called ReskillUSA, which will help connect people in cities from Los Angeles to Detroit to Miami with employers in need of tech talent. Codecademy is partnering with some of its fellow skills education startups, including Flatiron School, DevBootcamp, Sabio.la, Grand Circus, Wyncode, and Thinkful. Together, they’ve created an online platform where people can find coding classes and bootcamps across the country.
The partners are also actively urging employers to tap ReskillUSA’s graduate pipeline for potential employees. The goal, says Codecademy CEO Zach Sims, is to streamline what has become a fragmented industry of coding classes and camps.
Coding education has taken off in recent years, driven by reports that the demand for quality programmers in America is drastically outpacing the supply. So everyone from the White House to Google has jumped on the coding bandwagon. Meanwhile, bootcamps have sprung up across the country. But the challenge is there’s no way for employers to know that the so-called graduates of these programs are any good.
“They’re new. They don’t have track records, so it’s hard to look at a person who’s graduating and evaluate and screen them,” says Prasanna Tambe, an NYU professor specializing in IT work force. That’s one reason why employers are still more likely to look to universities for tech talent.
By joining forces, the ReskillUSA partners, Codecademy included, are hoping to lend some validity to their students. “We’re working together to try to train a cohort of students all at once,” says Sims, “so we can work with employers to make sure they realize we represent the largest block of students that are looking for jobs in the new economy now.”
As part of the new initiative, Codecademy, which has traditionally offered online coding education only, is launching its own offline classes called Codecademy Labs. These courses, which Sims says will cost $150-$200 — far less than the traditional bootcamp — will be hosted by other ReskillUSA partners across the country, but will be taught by former Codecademy students. Meanwhile, the other partners in the program will continue to run their bootcamp programs as they always have, only now, hopefully, with a little added exposure to a new population of students.
For now, the classes will focus exclusively on coding, though Sims says the group plans to expand into other industries and skills in the future. That, Tambe says, will be crucial. Even as coding education becomes ever more popular, conversations are mounting about the value of simply learning to code. “You can learn programming, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to thinking like a computer scientist or thinking about how to build large complex software projects,” he says. “It’s important that people understand what they’re learning and what they’re not.”
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