Starting the first of this year, we opened a window into the inner workings of our Web Development Bootcamp program. The Web Development Bootcamp Jobs Report helps you (and us!) see how well we are meeting our goals of admitting, training, and placing students in good programming jobs.
We update the statistics each month to reflect the new activity of the just-finished month. Here’s a look at the highlights of the changes for February.
We are excited to welcome 24 new students to the program this month. This brings our total current enrollment to 97 students. 14 students who enrolled last month passed the admission threshold, demonstrating that they are able to commit the necessary time to be successful in the program.
Five students graduated, and two of them already had jobs. One of our graduates this month was such a superstar that she was hired by her Web Development Bootcamp mentor (early access to promising new talent is one of the many benefits of being a mentor :) That brings the total number of graduates from 24 to 29. The graduation rate of students entering the program at least six months ago went up as well, from 47% to 51%.
With 24 new students, why only 5 graduates? The Web Development Bootcamp program is not yet a year old, and making it through the program takes about 6 months. 6 months ago the program was less than half the size it is today, so students that are graduating now come from a much smaller pool. We’ll expect the number of graduates to grow month-over-month through this year.
Our job placement rate is still great. It went up slightly (from 93% to 94%) on the strength of our new grads who found jobs. Thanks to our great Career Services team, we have only a handful of graduates still looking for jobs, and most of them haven’t been at it long.
Our gender balance shifted ever-so-slightly in the right direction. In January, we introduced a Women in Tech scholarship to bring down the financial barrier to entry for women and to foster a more gender-balanced community. Since we put the scholarship in place, about 29% of our new enrollments have been women, compared to 24% before the scholarship.
The way we report salary increases is more accurate. This is a surprisingly hard figure to compute. We have updated the calculation of “salary increase among job-seeking graduates” to look at the “percentage increase in the average salary”, which we feel is the most useful statistic. As it turns out, the figure is slightly lower than the one we reported in previous months, which was based on a smaller set of data.
Overall, the February statistics show us a Web Development Bootcamp program that is growing, healthy, and starting to fulfill its mission. We are proud of our students, proud of the program, and proud to be transparent about it.