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Los Angeles, like every tech community, has a serious lack of developers. So it raises eyebrows when an organization can create new developer talent from scratch.
General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive program and apprenticeship program are doing just that. On Wednesday, General Assembly program directors, instructors, students, apprentices and host companies sat down with the tech community to share just how they do it.
General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive (WDI) is 500 hours of immersive programming training over 12 weeks. With one instructor for every five students, the courses promise a lot of individual attention, so that students can complete the four projects required to graduate and boast full-stack developer skills.
The key to the program’s intensity is not allowing students to have another full-time job: “Just tell people it’s like you’re moving to San Francisco,” said recent graduate Emilia Kirschenbaum.
Admissions Producer Danoosh Kapadia said the typical reaction he gets when he describes the rigorous 12 weeks is: “People go to college for Computer Science. How can you teach it in 3 months?” For Danoosh, the answer is simple: “You eat, breath, sleep, and dream it.”
To encourage this full immersion, lessons are built around projects. For example, students start out with a seemingly simple tic-tac-toe programming project that turns out to be more complex then they anticipated. After that, they have three other projects that they choose and create themselves; because class is structured around projects, students don’t burn out on endless abstract lectures.
“When you work on something you care about, you’re more willing to put in the hours,” said Kirschenbaum.
Some people are initially skeptical about this non-academic approach to training programmers. “There is still a stigma around vocation education,” said, Jenn Cotter, General Assembly’s global program director of outcomes and alumni. But, this is “vocational education for the 21st century.”
“Once people understand why it works and how it works, they are excited about it,” Cotter said. “People are starting to shift and see the opportunities General Assembly is offering.”
Kirschenbaum said she is one of those people: “I almost went to graduate school this fall, but, for me, I was far more excited about WDI.”
What makes completing the intensive course especially exciting is the potential apprenticeship at the end. The apprenticeship program “offers an opportunity for companies to test graduates and an opportunity for graduates to test out companies,” said Cotter. General Assembly runs the 12-week apprenticeship program as a free courtesy to its graduates.
It’s also a very low-risk trial for the employer, she said. Hiring apprentices costs $3,500 per month and all that money goes straight to the developer as salary.
Despite the low-risk, Cotter said the program is not for everyone: ideally, small to medium size businesses will benefit the most. The time investment required to mentor apprentices may be too much for startups in their most critical early stages of development. Recent companies that participated in the apprenticeship program are Big Frame, Grub With Us, Spark Network, and The Audience.
The apprenticeship program, which also exists at General Assembly’s other locations across the globe, boasts strong hiring numbers: three out of four apprentices stay on as full-time employees with their host companies.
The success of the WDI and apprenticeship program has meant serious growth for General Assembly’s supporting staff. In the last 18 months its education support staff has grown from two to 14 employees - and there are plans to add more in the near future.
Watch for more Los Angeles tech companies partnering with General Assembly to fulfill their developer talent needs.
Find startup and tech web developer jobs in Los Angeles on the Built In LA job board.
