Skill Distillery Adds AngularJS to Its Java Bootcamp

(Newswire.net — December 8, 2016) Greenwood Village, Colorado — December 8, 2016) Denver, CO — Skill Distillery set out to establish a Bootcamp to give students the most job choices upon graduation. By adding coverage of Spring MVC, SQL, and Google’s AngularJS to its Java bootcamp, Skill Distillery graduates have access to more than 206,000 job openings nationwide. “Based on the number of job openings, this represents 3x as many job opportunities compared to coding schools that just focus on front-end technologies or Ruby. This is why our grads find jobs so quickly,” said Bruce Batky, a founder of Skill Distillery.

The 206,000 jobs include 78,133 Java Developer jobs; 28,775 front-end developer jobs; 54,688 .NET developer jobs; and 44,463 Android developer jobs. In addition to getting jobs quickly, graduates comment on how existing developers in the companies they are hired into are impressed with their understanding of programming as a whole.

“Honestly, I was terrified to start working as a developer. I sat in class for 5 months, not completely sure that anything I learned would truly be applicable in a real development environment. I kept thinking about how overwhelmed I felt at the beginning of Skill Distillery and expected my first week at work to feel the same. 

However, that is not at all the case. On day 2 they had me working on some CRUD projects, and apparently I finished them wayyyy before they expected me to, so much so that my boss had to meet with the project manager to find more work for me to do,” said Kaylee McBride, a Skill Distillery graduate.

The results speak for themselves with students being hired by companies large and small, including Raytheon, Price Waterhouse, Bank of America, IQNavigator, Ball Aerospace, Comcast, Zayo Group, ClickBank, TravelPort and the Department of Homeland Defense to name a few.

Skill Distillery has certainly made its impact in the corporate world. In 2016, over 98% of the graduates were placed into the role of “Java Developer,” which was once thought to be impossible. Many other bootcamps are happy to have their students work in companies as testers, Q/A engineers, or at the help desk, but Skill Distillery has proven its concept by having students hired in jobs that were formerly held by “senior” Java developers. A curious spin-off came unexpectedly as graduates have gone on to work as .NET developers as well as Android developers. Microsoft’s .NET is commonly known to be an almost exact copy of Java, and students from Skill Distillery were only investing a small amount of time learning.NET syntax to become proficient enough to attain .NET developer positions. As for Android, what most people do not realize is that Java is the base language for all Android applications, and therefore, a prerequisite for any developer using the technology. Beyond the back-end developer jobs, students are also entering jobs as front-end developers. “Students graduate with full stack developer skills from the bootcamp that are applicable to both front-end website development and back-end server jobs,” according to School Director Cole Frock.  

At Skill Distillery, founder Bruce Batky wanted to create a program that was affordable for the average person but that would also give someone looking to change their career quickly the most options out of the gate. At the time Skill Distillery started, there were many bootcamps teaching Ruby and some just focusing on the front-end language known as JavaScript. Batky and his team began analyzing data from their 25-year training history and quickly found that the one language Batky-Howell taught the most of was Java. When looking at the job boards, they also saw that Java was the most in-demand programming language with over 50,000 job postings nationwide. The true obstacle was now clear. The reason there were no Java bootcamps was that it was considered “impossible” to take someone with no programming background and get them a job as a Java developer. The need for other frameworks such as Spring and MVC would be necessary as well as the need to cover topics from the Java server side known as J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition). To complicate the issue further, Skill Distillery would still need to include all of the front-end technologies such as JavaScript and AngularJS in order to ensure that their students could truly be “Full Stack” developers. The amount of content was enormous and required the teaching style to be completely revamped from the ground up as well as the development of additional hands-on materials. The upside was that anyone that could go through this program and successfully complete the course objectives would immediately be employable because the skills taught at this bootcamp are exactly what corporations around the world want.

The Skill Distillery four-month Java web development bootcamp began over 25 years ago with Batky-Howell, one of the nation’s leading corporate training companies. During that time, the company began its journey teaching Perl and Unix classes but quickly saw the need to expand its offerings as the need for retraining existing developers was on the rise. Batky-Howell started developing materials in Java, .NET, Linux, Oracle and Python and over time built its curriculum to over 200 courses. As the company grew into a multi-million dollar company, they quickly saw the industry as a whole growing right along with them. CEO Bruce Batky saw a very distinct need in the industry for more concise and specific training materials that were referred to as “instructor led training courseware.” Thus, its sister company, ITCourseware, was born. The new company gave Batky the ability to develop internal materials that would go on to be sold worldwide, not only to corporations for their own internal training needs but also to other training companies similar to Batky-Howell. The two companies combined would set the standard for corporate training as well as lay the groundwork for future course development standards. In the last 25 years, Batky-Howell has trained over 40,000 corporate software developers and its publishing arm, ITCourseware, has sales in the millions.

Fast forward to today. Corporations have changed their opinion on training internal employees since there is a 500,000 developer shortage throughout the United States. This lack of talent created a massive employee retention issue to the point of losing new employees in less than a year. The situation became so bad that by training internal employees, you were simply enabling them to take jobs elsewhere for more money. In the early 2000’s, there was a common phrase among developers: “If you want a raise at your current job, ask for training so that you can jump to another company.” The corporate culture of layoffs and employee distrust had practically halted traditional corporate training, leaving individual employees to source their own training. Corporations had a dilemma. Universities were only producing approximately 50,000 computer science graduates per year, and the shortage of developers with practical skills was dwindling. A new system of talent development and corporate IT growth was born – coding bootcamps.

Around 2010, Batky-Howell was being approached by its clients with a new need referred to as “New Hire Bootcamps.” These bootcamps were programs in which the company would pick and choose specific courses from Batky-Howell’s offerings and group them together to form a fully customized, comprehensive training program. The other addition to this new training style was the student itself. Corporations would first try to attract new employees from local colleges who had recently graduated with computer science degrees. The reality, however, was this was not a viable option due to the shortage of computer science graduates. This led to hiring college graduates with any degree and training them. Batky-Howell had developed over five custom bootcamps for a variety of Fortune 100 corporations around the world with outstanding success! The need for this type of training was the genesis of Skill Distillery.

About Skill Distillery

Headquartered in the Denver Tech Center, Colorado, Skill Distillery is a 16-week, full-stack Java programming school with rolling admissions for cohorts throughout the year. Certified to accept the GI Bill®.  Learn more at SkillDistillery.com

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Media Contact: Janet Rehberger, 303 302-5234, Janet@skilldistillery.com

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