Boot camps fill void for university graduates
Wanted: Web developers and coders for ‘gold rush’
TORONTO — Three years ago, Erik Dohnberg was working at the Genius Bar at an Apple store in London, Ont.
He’d been there for 10 months after graduating with an information and media studies degree from Western University when he decided he wanted more.
With the intention of starting up his own business, Dohnberg signed up for a nine-week boot camp at Bitmaker Labs, a web developer training school in Toronto.
Within two weeks of completing the boot camp, Dohnberg had 16 job interviews and received two job offers. One of them was from Bitmaker Labs.
Dohnberg said he doesn’t regret going to university, but also doesn’t think it prepared him to get a real job. Most of his classmates went on to graduate studies.
“It was education for the sake of more education,” said Dohnberg, now an admissions manager at Bitmaker. “I can write a hell of an essay on ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ f an fiction but, really, that’s irrelevant to practical skills. I’m a good writer but that’s about it.”
Tech skills programs like the ones at Bitmaker Labs have been sprouting up over the past few years in response to a tech talent shortage in Canada. It’s a problem that has been bubbling to the surface, as more startups open up shop and try to recruit from an alreadysmall pool of Canadian developers.
A report released earlier this month by the Information and Communications Technology Council estimates that 218,000 tech jobs will be created in Canada by 2020. It warns that it could cost the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity, tax revenues and GDP if Canada doesn’t address the tech skills gap.
“It is imperative that this challenge is tackled, especially if Canada wants to secure its place as a competitive leader i n the global economy,” the 57-page report says.
At Bitmaker, courses range from weekend boot camps to an intensive nine-week course for $9,000. The school believes anyone can learn how to code and its students include everyone from college and university dropouts to ex-engineers, investment bankers and skilled labourers. Bitmaker has also enrolled computer engineer and science graduates looking to update their skills.
Dohnberg said such boot camps are still not producing workers fast enough to meet the demands of the ever-evolving tech industry, making it vital for colleges and universities to tailor their programs for jobs in the sector.
“(Universities) are not focused on education. They’re focused on grades and a piece of paper at the end, because for decades, that has been the way you get a job and open up new opportunities,” he said.
“Now that’s not enough. Universities need to start understanding how people actually learn and come up with innovative ways to imparting education to those people.”
Vancouver-based Lighthouse Labs, which also runs web developer boot camps, sees its role as completely separate from that of a postsecondary institution.
“We consider ourselves complementary to university. We’re not trying to undercut it or disrupt it,” said Jeremy Shaki, Lighthouse chief executive.