The Software Guild’s founders came together with the mission to provide quality education to aspiring software developers. Software engineers with an average of over 10 years of experience each felt they could provide a much deeper and more successful educational experience than the one they saw in many different schools around them.
This bootcamp provides verifiable and proven results with two key factors. First, you’ll become a quality programmer through its strong training on industry-standard tools. Then, The Software Guild’s career services add the special seasoning that makes the school’s graduates into in-demand candidates.
The Software Guild’s Success By The Numbers
The Software Guild’s track record speaks for itself, with 91 percent of graduates from its Minneapolis campus employed full-time in their fields of choice within six months. And you don’t have to take their word for it. The Software Guild is a founding member of the Council of Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), an independent organization that verifies coding bootcamp results through its own investigative process.
Graduates reported a median base salary of $60,000 to the CIRR as well. This substantial salary means you can expect to earn more than the median national salary of $56,310. This boost to your earning potential will ease your financial situation, giving you more than just a career. You’ll be able to stop focusing on your finances and enjoy a new and more fulfilling career.
Apprentices land jobs that let them use the tools they’ve spent their time honing as well. Most graduates end up as software developers or associate consultants, but many also found jobs in application development or junior-level programming. Your role will differ across companies, but many of the biggest companies in the world come calling when they need new employees.
The Software Guild boasts an employer network of over 450 companies. These are companies large and small, including big names like UPS, Target, Nationwide, Valspar, and more. These organizations trust The Software Guild to produce quality Java and .NET/C# programmers that can come in and contribute.
But The Software Guild’s graduates can rely on more than quality connections to find a job. The school offers quality career services that prepare apprentices for their job hunt. By the time apprentices finish their career services training, they’ll be able to impress just about any recruiter they encounter. And after hearing this graduate’s story, you’ll see why.
An Apprentice’s Tale
Matt Gozel graduated from college in 2010, worked as an academic advisor for a few years, and then pivoted to a sales role at United Health Group for a couple of years. He’d taken some Ruby courses on his own, but after talking to some developer friends in his area, he decided to go a different direction. He always felt like coding would be a good direction for him.
“It always felt like a field where I could be creative but still technical,” Matt said. “Because I’ve always wished I was more creative, I can’t sing, I have no rhythm, I can’t draw or paint or anything at all. I’ve always had that artistic itch I’ve wanted to scratch, but my brain is more analytical and technical. Coding seemed like a good fit for the best of both worlds.”
Matt went from playing around with HTML and CSS back in the MySpace era to landing a job at a consulting company around six weeks after graduating. Even though he had no professional background in tech, Matt quickly found success after graduating from the self-paced digital coding badges program at The Software Guild.
“I did the .NET/C# program there, and it took me about 10 months to complete,” Matt said. “I finished that in March, and by the end of April, I had multiple job offers for professional software developer roles, and I picked the one that I thought was the best fit.”
Matt says that he couldn’t have done it without the amazing help he received at The Software Guild, specifically from Kipp Graham, the program’s Director of Career Services.
“We had recurring weekly meetings which he scheduled so we could sit back and talk about where we were in the process,” Matt said. “He wanted me to keep a detailed spreadsheet of where I had applied, and if I had heard back if I had a first interview, second interview, and things like that. I would share the spreadsheet with him every week to hold me accountable, to keep me on track with looking for jobs, and he was really great about sending my resume out to The Software Guild’s contacts in the community.”
Career Help Tailored To Your Needs
Before Matt joined a consulting company where he now works on Dell’s data pipeline team, he got some key help from Kipp on making himself into the most attractive candidate possible.
“Our first introduction when we talked on the phone, he’d looked briefly at my resume and LinkedIn, and he gave me tips on how to improve those to make them more appealing to people who were hiring in tech,” Matt said. “He told me how to set those up so that the keywords automatically get picked up by the algorithm that people use to screen applications. We went over tips for networking in our first meeting and big picture stuff about who I was, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go in coding.”
Kipp believes that The Software Guild’s individualized career services plans are one of the things that set this educator apart from its competition. He helped Matt optimize his job searching materials to attract recruiters more easily, but the approach differs depending on the person.
For example, the school recently had two apprentices in very different situations. One apprentice was a high school graduate who’d worked in construction for around five years, and the other was a CEO of his own company who wanted to take a step back in his career. Both students had different needs and different goals, and Kipp and the career services team served them both with the same level of care and attention.
“The amount of time we work together differs, as well as what we’re working on,” Kipp said. “Whether we’re focusing mainly on your resume and applications for the first guy, or maybe doing more networking and customized informational interviews are really going to differ based on [your situation]. So it’s not just a one-process-fits-all type of environment here. We really work with the individual to figure out their goals and come up with a plan for how we can best help them.”
The Software Guild’s Hiring Partners
After Matt revised his job hunt materials, he landed the aforementioned job with one of The Software Guild’s hiring partners. The Software Guild’s network of over 450 hiring partners is the result of hard work from Kipp and his team in the career services department.
“I’ve been with the company for a little less than six years now, and when I first started we were a little smaller, didn’t have as many graduates bouncing around, so that was all me reaching out,” Kipp said. “But now I would say it’s about 50-50, companies coming to me and my team reaching out to companies.”
Kipp said the team looks for two things when finding new hiring partners. Firstly, The Software Guild wants to ensure that the partners are looking to hire junior-level software developers.
“There’s a lot of needs out there, but sometimes companies have the wrong idea about who they’re looking to hire,” Kipp said. “Like, they want our students to go into help desk roles and things like that, or just roles that aren’t really going to advance their career. So first, we want to make sure they’ve got the right idea for what type of jobs our students will be doing.”
After both sides are clear on their needs, then the career services team makes sure that the employer will support the apprentice as they find their footing in the field.
“We stand by our program 100 percent, but they’re still junior when they come out of the program,” Kipp said. “It’s going to be their first job as a software developer, and I don’t care if you’ve had an internship and a four-year degree and a master’s degree, if it’s your first job, you’re going to need a bit of assistance. So we make sure they have some sort of mentorship program, or even if they have a buddy system they can go to. Something’s in place where they’re gonna help train that person up and help them understand their first role.”
Lifelong Support
Even if students don’t find a job as quickly as Matt, or if they’re not satisfied with the job they do land, The Software Guild will stick with them for life.
“We will work with you until you get a job or you stop calling me,” Kipp said. “So once a student graduates, we set up a meeting, at the bare minimum, every two weeks. Hopefully, it’s a lot more than that, but as long as you’re continuing to apply to jobs and put in the effort to look for work, we will be here to help you. Most of the time that’s a matter of months, but if you happen to, let’s say, graduate during a big pandemic, we will be here with you for the long haul until you reach the goals that you’re looking for.”
And according to Matt, who completed his apprenticeship while working a full-time job and raising two small children, The Software Guild more than delivers on its promise to help you reach your goals.
“If you want to go into tech, you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort,” Matt said. ”Sometimes there are going to be frustrations and hard moments, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it. It’s going to lead to a really fulfilling career. And, as far as where you go after the Guild, the sky’s the limit. There are so many areas and different avenues you can go down, so it’s absolutely worthwhile.”
Claim Your Software Development Success
The Software Guild has helped over 1,400 people enter the software development field since its establishment in 2013. And its success is no accident. This organization works with students of all stripes every day to give them the best outcome. You’ll tell Kipp and the career services team your goals, and they’ll work tirelessly to make sure that you reach them.
If you want to experience the life-changing support and job training that’s made The Software Guild so successful, apply today.
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.
