Our friends at Course Report recently came out with their annual coding bootcamp market size report, and some interesting findings came out of their research.
Course Report polled every full-time, in-person US and Canadian bootcamp with courses in web and mobile development, gathering statistics on 2015 graduates and projected 2016 graduation rates. They had staggering response rate, talking to an impressive 96.7% of all bootcamp schools.
One of the most interesting facts they discovered is that Javascript and the MEAN stack has overtaken Ruby on Rails as the most popular language taught at coding bootcamps. We’ll go into more detail later on why this matters, but here are a couple of other interesting points from the study:
By the end of this year, the coding bootcamp market is expected to grow from 10,333 to roughly 18,000 bootcamp graduates. Comparatively, four year colleges will graduate 61,408 CS graduates this year. It is becoming clear that for those interested in getting into development, a CS degree is not the only path to becoming a full-time coder. Coding bootcamps are getting more and more popular as an education path.
There are now 91 coding bootcamps to choose from. As the number of coding bootcamps increases, it can be more challenging to determine which one is the right fit for you. A lot has been written on this topic, so we won’t belabor the point here. However, it is more important than ever that you do your research, figure out your goals for your coding bootcamp experience and make sure the one you choose aligns with those goals.
Back to the question of why is the MEAN stack overtaking Ruby on Rails as the most popular technology taught in bootcamps? The answer can be found in a couple of trends, including the increasing popularity of noSQL technologies such as MongoDB and frameworks such as AngularJS, ReactJS, and the server-side NodeJS. The common thread here is Javascript, and it makes the bootcamp experience a lot smoother and more effective to focus on coding in one language over the course of the cohort.
“This trend affirms what we’ve always known at DevMountain,” said DevMountain CEO Cahlan Sharp. “Javascript and the MEAN stack are more versatile and useful for beginning developers to use in entry level coding jobs. We’ve focused on Javascript in our web courses from the beginning and will for the foreseeable future.”
Make sure to check out Course Report’s study. As coding bootcamps continue to boom, now more than ever is a great time to learn to code and change the trajectory of your life. If you are interested in learning more about any of our courses, check out DevMountain’s upcoming courses on our homepage.