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I’ve just finished my code bootcamp. What should I learn next?
I was recently at a tech recruitment event on behalf of Caution Your Blast (yep, we’re hiring) and spoke to many eager developers looking for jobs. Most of these developers had just graduated from code bootcamps and were struggling to get junior or entry-level roles.
This sounded super odd to me since I know there aren’t enough developers in the UK to fill the positions that are out there, so I enquired further and, was honestly a bit shocked by the answer. Typescript, Jest and Node.js are some of the technologies people mentioned that were expected of a junior developer. This was (and still is) shocking to me because there’s NO WAY I would expect a junior developer to know all of those things. I’ve created a few Typescript courses in my time and there are a lot of advanced concepts that I would not expect someone who has been coding for 3–6 months to grasp.
In my disbelief, I did some digging by looking at some job adverts and they weren’t wrong. Long gone are the days when you could land a dev job with just HTML, CSS and jQuery. What makes things worse for these graduates is that these skills are usually not taught by the coding bootcamps. If they aim to make students job-ready after they graduate then I wonder why students aren’t taught these skills.
