When planning a career change, it’s only logical to opt for industries that show resilience and agility. Which industries hold the most promise? Which has remained afloat and thrived in the face of crisis? When it’s time to take a step outside of your current field, proceeding with caution is often a good way to go. And it’s become a more fitting response amid today’s turbulent times.
Earlier this year, millions of people were jolted out of their comfort zones with the onslaught of a pandemic. Most found themselves out of jobs and scrambling to make ends meet. Some were forced to bend over backward to retain their source of income. And few were lucky enough to be on the receiving end of industry growth brought by an overnight digital shift.
“In recent months, pandemic-fueled anxiety has pushed laid-off workers into an educational sprint,” reported the Washington Post. At the forefront of these sprints are coding bootcamps, representing a new generation of talent platforms that promise accelerated learning and employability. The question is, do they work?
On Second Thought
As 2019 drew to a close, Aderemi Odufuye came to a decision he thought he’d never make. He applied for Flatiron School’s 15-week software engineering bootcamp. Aderemi, or Remi, isn’t a novice in tech. He’s been in the industry for years working as an applications specialist. But he still wanted to get his foot in programming, recognizing it as an invaluable key to unlocking lucrative opportunities in tech.
“For the longest time, I always thought that the idea of going to a bootcamp wasn’t a great one,” said Remi in a video that documented his journey in Flatiron School. “People have this concept that at a bootcamp, you just have this structured environment that walks you through everything you need to know. And that’s true. But at the same time, it grossly understated what happens in a bootcamp. [It] is, in my personal opinion, the best way to learn how to code.”
His opinion wasn’t unwarranted. Shortly after graduating from Flatiron School, he landed a job as a software engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—yes, that’s NASA—all while remaining an active advocate for the tech industry. Amid a tenuous economic climate, Remi has managed to thrive. He relaunched a career in tech and grabbed the opportunities the industry has to offer. And he’s not alone.
Eight years since its inception, Flatiron School has seen thousands of students transform from rookies to seasoned tech professionals. In Flatiron School’s 2020 Jobs Report, 86 percent of its job-seeking alums secured jobs in a range of tech fields. Graduates who landed full-times salaried roles reported an average starting salary of $69,895
Placement Rate: For job-seeking on-campus and online graduates included in the 2020 Jobs Report including full-time salaried roles, full-time contract, internship, apprenticeship, and freelance roles, and part-time roles during the reporting period.
Average Salary: For job-seeking on-campus US graduates who accepted full-time salaried jobs during the reporting period and disclosed their compensation. The average starting salary for US on-campus graduates who accepted full-time contract, internship, apprenticeship, or freelance roles and disclosed compensation was $33/hr. Average pay for a part-time role was $24/hr (see full Jobs Report).
And for nearly a decade, the school has not wavered from its strong job placement rate. Its steadfast performance sends a clear message: Flatiron School is a solid pathway for those ready to take a big step towards a new tech career.
Working Beyond the Campus Walls
It would be remiss to talk about Flatiron School’s bootcamps by simply laying out their curricula. Since Flatiron promotes results-oriented training, we figured the only right way to speak for the school is by demonstrating its impact beyond the bootcamp. How has its bootcamps helped alums make successful career transitions? And what exactly are the doors that its bootcamps open?
The answer to the first question is easy: Flatiron School’s support system is powerful.
In Flatiron School’s intensive bootcamps, long hours are the norm. For Remi, this meant going to school for 15 weeks from nine o’clock in the morning until six in the evening and doing nine hours of bang-your-head-against-the-wall work.
“It was really, really hard. If I say it was easy, I just won’t be telling you the truth. It was hard—not just the concepts but with where I was in life. With everything that’s been going on…the family, the kids, it was hard to pull it off. But I’m glad I did,” said Remi. Alongside the rigorous training was a support system that was just as robust.
“What you can get in the bootcamp—or one of the advantages—is the fact that you have people that you can ask loads and loads of questions,” said Remi. “In a bootcamp, you have mentors, you have classmates who will be in the same cohort with you…and you have a coach who will guide you and hold your hand.”
The school offers comprehensive guidance on all fronts—during your training and onto the job-search period—courtesy of its career services team. It works to advance the “we” mindset and abandons the isolating sink-or-swim approach that’s so frequently seen in universities and colleges.
Career Coaching
The career services can be divided into two teams of different yet interrelated functions: career coaching and employer partnerships. Under the Career Coaching team, students approaching graduation undergo one-on-one personalized counseling sessions with a Career Coach who guides them into becoming “no-brainer hires.” The career coaching sessions aren’t your typical college career centers, where only 28 percent of students who sought advice for career options found the service helpful.
Flatiron’s sessions cover the ins and outs of building a personal brand that works to drum up interest in your candidacy. Mock cultural and technical interviews are also conducted to help immediately highlight your strengths, prove your value, and negotiate offers.
Employer Partnerships
On the other end, the Employer Partnerships team builds and maintains a nationwide network of hiring partners, including companies like Facebook, Amazon, JPMorgan, and Microsoft. The team takes a customized approach with each employer to learn what their ideal candidate looks like and identify tailored methods for engaging with Flatiron graduates. These include webinars, recruiting events, scheduling phone screens, and networking events, among others. By presenting right-fit candidates to these employers and providing seamless hiring processes, the Employer Partnerships team creates loyal employers who hire from Flatiron again and again.
Individually, each team focuses on the two sides of hire: the employers and the candidates. Put together, they bridge the gap between these two in a way that allows them to thrive together. This brings us to the next question. For a school that boasts the ability to unlock opportunities in tech, where exactly do these doors lead to?
Careers After the Bootcamp: Titles and Tasks
[Indeed and Glassdoor numbers are as of PUBLISHING DATE]
Career reinvention is rarely so linear. In a dynamic industry such as tech, there’s never just one path; there’s plenty. This is why the most successful career switchers are those that demonstrate flexibility and a ferocious appetite for continuous learning. It’s at this juncture that Flatiron School’s bootcamps come into play.
Software Engineering
First up is software engineering. Historically, engineers—from any industry—have always been in demand. In this year’s LinkedIn Emerging Jobs Report, those from the software industry took the helm with software engineering roles claiming a third of the top 15 seats.
Little wonder why Flatiron School’s Software Engineering program remains one of the most popular bootcamps. During the 15-week program, students develop proficiency in coding while amassing an impressive portfolio of functional web applications. They come out of the program with a strong coding foundation as well as an understanding of how products are designed and created. This allows them to explore different directions in the software engineering field.
Software Engineer
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $107,725 (with $4,000 cash bonus)
This is perhaps the most obvious and most commonly chosen path by bootcamp grads. Software engineers execute all the steps involved in delivering software to a customer. These include writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining software in a way that meets the needs of the customer. And that’s really where most of their day is spent: building software from start to finish.
While the job—in the eyes of some—may seem dull and tedious, 85 percent of software engineers say otherwise. A survey conducted by career marketplace Hired revealed that high job satisfaction is the rule, not the exception, among software engineers. Among the reasons cited was the role’s ability to provide room for growth, learning, and creativity.
Web Developer
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $78,178 (with $2,000 cash bonus)
To the casual speaker, web developers are basically software engineers who specialize in developing web applications using technologies, such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Their typical day varies depending on the side they’re focusing on: the client side or the server side.
In charge of the former are the front-end web developers who implement the elements of a website that users see and interact with. The content, layers, functions, and visual aspects, you name it. Everything you see and use every time you open a browser, use an application, or play a game, they made it possible.
Working behind the scenes are the back-end developers who build the foundations of the website. They build, code, and develop the elements that users never see: a server, an application, and a database. Without them, it’s impossible for the end-user to have a seamless experience. You can take your pick between either paths. But if both appeal to you, then simply master both and be a full-stack developer.
Solutions Engineer
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $117,316 (with $19,000 commission)
If you want to work on both the technical and business aspects of projects then another unconventional path you can take is a solutions engineering career. Problem-solvers fill this role, with roughly most of their time spent identifying customers’ hardware and software issues and delivering cost-effective solutions accordingly. They do so by building features and products in collaboration with other departments, such as sales, design, development, and marketing.
Engineering Manager
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $128,324
Traditionally, this is where software engineers advance to. As the title implies, engineering managers are in charge of developing and refining the engineering team to meet set goals. This means driving the team to ship a working software on time and to specifications. In this role, the amount of coding one does is reduced in favor of running one-on-one training sessions, planning team-building exercises, and creating strategy roadmaps.
Entrepreneur
Median pay [according to Glassdoor]: $92,046
Not everyone who knows how to code chooses to spend their days writing code. Some prefer to start their own business. For software entrepreneurs, this means having the freedom to transform their tech ideas into functional products.
While knowing how to spell code makes the job a lot easier, a software startup’s success will largely rely on much more. That is, having strong business acumen as well as excellent people management, networking, and decision-making skills. Needless to say, knowing how to code adds great value to software entrepreneurs. For one, it allows them to build their minimum viable product and run their experiments.
In Flatiron School’s 2020 Jobs Report, 86 percent of the nearly 1,200 job-seeking alums of Flatiron School’s Software Engineering program successfully secured jobs post-program. (*for job-seeking on-campus and online graduates included in the 2020 Jobs Report including full-time salaried roles, full-time contract, internship, apprenticeship, and freelance roles, and part-time roles during the reporting period; see full Jobs Report here)
Data Science
Another field that bears mentioning is data science, a field which the Harvard Business Review touted as “the sexiest job of the 21st century” yet “arguably, the vaguest.” A simple explanation points to the field’s multidisciplinary nature.
On the most basic level, data science isn’t a cut-and-dried field. Rather, it combines several disciplines such as statistics, machine learning, computer science, and data analysis. While this may be a daunting aspect for those who wish to break into the field, there’s a better way of looking at it: data science’s multidisciplinary nature actually opens a multitude of opportunities for progression.
Data Scientist
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $123,345
Despite being a relatively new role, data scientists have emerged as one of the most sought-after professionals across industries. On any given day, data scientists can be found gathering, cleaning, and analyzing massive datasets, after which they create algorithms and predictive models. These are later used to forecast events and help business leaders derive strategic decisions for the growth of the company. Through their input, data scientists make or break an organization’s position among its competitors.
Data Analyst
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $75,416
From the outside, there’s often a gray area between the functions of data analysts and data scientists. But while both work with data, the way they utilize it varies. Data analysts analyze vast data, identify patterns, and summarize them. Their summaries, in turn, provide context to a company’s past performance. Why was there a sudden spike in sales? Why did a certain marketing campaign fail? Which regions were most receptive to marketing strategies?
In a sense, data analysts are storytellers. They work with structured data to see how things unfolded, after which they offer a new perspective to things already known. Data scientists, on the other hand, are reliable fortune-tellers who work with both structured and unstructured data to estimate the unknown.
Customer Insights Analyst
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $93,001
As the title suggests, these analysts give organizations a peek into what drives certain consumer behaviors. They then leverage these insights to project sales trends, improve marketing strategies, and expand customer base. Customer insights analysts serve as the direct technical bridge between customers and organizations, making sure that the decisions of the latter are always geared to meet the needs of the former.
Analytics Manager
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $114,459 (with $9,000 cash bonus)
An analytics manager is the driver of the analytics team, ensuring that the team’s overall tasks from the data collection and modeling to analysis is done accurately. S/he then works closely with leaders from other departments to ensure the implementation of data-driven decisions that are expected to support business outcomes.
Statistician
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $102,461
As summarized by LinkedIn’s Emerging Jobs Report, data science continues to grow at a tremendous scale, going as far as “augmenting responsibilities traditionally done by statisticians.” This is why those with data science proficiency can fulfill the role of a statistician.
On a typical day, statisticians analyze and interpret numerical data collected via data gathering tools such as surveys, polls, and questionnaires. Their responsibilities may seem similar to data scientists. And that’s because the role of a statistician has been around for ages. Its distinction from a data scientist, therefore, ultimately lies in the latter’s use of new technologies.
Considered as a young field, universities and colleges didn’t fully adopt data science programs until late. In their place came the data science bootcamps with curricula that perfectly matched the industry’s demands and dynamism.
One of these is Flatiron’s Data Science training program which promises to “give you the breadth and depth needed to become a well-rounded data scientist.” And it’s kept its word. In Flatiron School’s 2020 Jobs Report, 86 percent* of the respondent alums accepted a job offer within the reporting period. Graduates who secured full-time salaried roles reported an average starting salary of $85,737.
Placement Rate: For job-seeking on-campus and online graduates included in the 2020 Jobs Report including full-time salaried roles, full-time contract, internship, apprenticeship, and freelance roles, and part-time roles during the reporting period.
Average Salary: For job-seeking on-campus US graduates who accepted full-time salaried jobs during the reporting period and disclosed their compensation. The average starting salary for US on-campus graduates who accepted full-time contract, internship, apprenticeship, or freelance roles and disclosed compensation was $33/hr. Average pay for a part-time role was $24/hr (see full Jobs Report).
Cybersecurity Analytics
Flatiron School’s introduction of the Cybersecurity Analytics Bootcamp is a fitting response to today’s increasing cybersecurity needs. Driven by a growing number of cyberattacks due to the rapid and unprecedented transition to Cloud, companies are advancing cyber resilience with security analysts.
Threat Intelligence Analyst
Median pay [according to Glassdoor]: $112,468
A threat intel analyst is in charge of conducting diagnostic tests to assess the strength of a company’s security system. From these, the analyst identifies vulnerabilities in the system as well as potential cyber threats for future mitigation or detection. It’s safe to say that threat analysts spend their days playing cat and mouse. They monitor the system, and try to stay ahead of hackers who attempt to steal, corrupt, or take over confidential data.
Security Compliance Analyst
Median pay [according to Payscale]: $90,000
A security compliance analyst ensures that a company’s network adheres to internal and external cybersecurity policies and standards. In line with this, they provide feedback and constructive recommendations to make sure that any issues are corrected immediately. Security compliance analysts keep a company’s confidentiality and integrity in check.
Cybersecurity Engineering
With the recent uproar in cybersecurity attacks, another field in need of highly-trained talent is cybersecurity engineering. Whereas analysts uncover potential pain points and threats, engineers develop and implement high-tech solutions and security controls to defend the perimeter. Put another way, engineering roles execute more of the hands-on work, developing security systems from the ground up.
Recognizing the renewed urgency for security professionals, Flatiron School recently unveiled its Cybersecurity Engineering bootcamp. The bootcamp is a 15-week program that prepares career switchers for a broad range of cybersecurity jobs.
Security Engineer
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $109,182
Sometimes called information security engineers, these professionals build firewalls and systems that guarantee the safety of sensitive data. Due to the nature of data they handle daily, security engineers have a knack for working under tremendous pressure, a job hazard that’s immediately offset by a six-figure salary.
Penetration Tester
Median pay [according to Indeed]: $120,629
Also going by the title of “ethical hackers,” pen testers are—as their other title indicates—the well-intentioned hackers. Pen testers are generally seen trying to break into networks to expose weak spots in need of improved protection. Sounds exciting? It is. Pen testers spend the bulk of their day trying to outwit security administrators and designers. Of course, like any other job, the fun ends when written reports come into play.
Covering Flatiron School’s career switcher bootcamps, the words of Avi Flombaum, co-founder, come to mind. “If we’ve done our job and you’ve got the grit, the list is virtually limitless. A misconception that I’ve noticed…is that coding bootcamps teach just a specific technical skill…”
“We don’t have time to teach you everything…so we have a different aim at Flatiron School: to help students learn how to learn. If they’ve done that, they can continue to learn on the job, to pick up new skills and languages that we explicitly don’t teach here, and really customize their career paths based on their interests.”
The New Faces of Tech
The last part starts early in the game through Flatiron School’s capstone projects. This was put in place to give students the chance to dedicate everything they learned to execute projects of their choosing. Doing so gives them a taste of the challenges and excitement that come with building projects from scratch and watching their ideas come to life.
For Remi, this materialized when he made Bitbank. Bitbank is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange where users can follow cryptocurrencies and build a portfolio of the different crypto assets they’ve acquired. The project caught the eye of many, including Career Karma which hailed it as one of the best coding projects earlier this year.
Another notable project was a COVID-19 forecasting model made by Khairul Omar, a Flatiron School Data Science bootcamp alum. Like Remi, Khairul also made a career pivot at the height of the pandemic. And like Remi, his project also caught the eyes of notable figures, particularly an official from the Malaysian Ministry of Health.
Shortly after he presented his project, Khairul was tapped by the Malaysian government to run multiple studies regarding the pandemic. In particular, the studies determined the best virus mitigation practices as well as standards that need to be met before lockdowns are eased. At present, Khairul works as an analytics development manager for Sainsbury’s, the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom.
“I’ve earned a couple of certifications in my life. I have a bachelor’s degree in [metallurgical and materials] engineering but nothing right now means more to me than this piece of paper,” said Remi as he held up the certificate of completion he received after completing the Flatiron School bootcamp.
“This represents hard work. This represents dedication. This represents never giving up…I think in life, you don’t get what you want. You get what you absolutely have to have and this is something I really had to do.”
Find Your Fit
Flatiron School helps people navigate a career change with confidence. It fronts both academic and career services that work to respond not just to market demands but also to the needs of aspiring employees. This is backed by the successes of Remi, Khairul, and the countless alumni of the Flatiron School bootcamps.
So, if you’re waiting for a sign or a nudge to jumpstart your career makeover, now is as good a time as any. Take this opportunity to “learn how to learn” and discover the range of opportunities that you can explore. Because if there’s anything to be learned from the Flatiron School initiative, it’s that lifelong learning is the secret to lifelong success.
About us: Career Karma is a platform designed to help job seekers find, research, and connect with job training programs to advance their careers. Learn about the CK publication.
