Jeremiah Stafford spent nearly 25 years in the finance arena working for companies like Barclays and Citigroup before making a sharp turn in 2019 to work in tech, so he enrolled in the inaugural class of UConn’s Coding Boot Camp.
Stafford’s career move may seem peculiar, but he’d seen older workers in his field eventually replaced by younger colleagues, while demand for IT and web and software development was growing and projected to continue on an upward trajectory.
“As I looked at what I was going to do next, coding kept popping up in terms of the highly sought after skills,” said the 46-year-old Stafford, who completed the coding program last year, and now works as a web developer at Norwalk digital advertising startup Flashtalking. “I needed to have a skill set to start at the ground level.”
UConn is the state’s flagship university best-known for its traditional four-year degree and graduate-school programs, but last year it launched a six-month Coding Boot Camp certificate program in Hartford and Stamford, aimed at creating a pipeline of web developers and other techies who are in high demand here in Connecticut and elsewhere.
In fact, some have blamed Connecticut’s inability to attract more technology companies on its dearth of tech talent. That’s a major focus of the state’s new workforce development czar: enabling Connecticut to produce more tech workers to fill positions at companies like Flashtalking and Infosys, which opened a Hartford office in 2018 and has added hundreds of jobs here, with hopes to grow further.
Added to its traditional degree programs, UConn sees Coding Boot Camp as a tool that could help fill that tech skills gap, said Kylene Perras, director of professional education at UConn’s School of Engineering, which oversees the program.
UConn Coding Boot Camp is largely geared toward working professionals looking to break into web development and IT.
While Connecticut’s economy struggled to grow jobs over the last decade, positions in those fields grew 25% between 2012 and 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, the number of coding-centric jobs are projected to grow 22% by 2029, BLS data shows.
“The amount of need in IT is pretty expansive and includes coding,” said Kelli-Marie Vallieres, a former manufacturing CEO who is now head of the Lamont administration’s recently-established Connecticut Workforce Unit, which handles workforce development policy in the state. “The IT industry, although they value a four-year degree, they also understand that the skill sets that they’re looking for can be filled with these very specific training programs.”
Market-driven curriculum
UConn’s six-month boot camp teaches coding languages like JavaScript and HTML5 — skills pupils can use for things like software development, Perras said. Upon completion of the course, students should be proficient in “full-stack” web development, which is the ability to develop a web-based app from scratch.
UConn partners with Trilogy Education Services, a New York-based technology education company that writes the program’s curriculum. Trilogy was recently acquired by 2U, an ed-tech company based in Maryland.
The curriculum teaches the exact skills recruiters at tech companies look for in applicants, Perras said, and should meet the needs of adults looking for a change in careers, or to upskill in order to advance in a current job. Students meet for three classes each week (totaling 13 hours per week), for a price of just under $11,500.
“At UConn, we review the market-driven curriculum with our capital team, we vet instructors, and analyze different questions and feedback on a weekly basis,” Perras said, adding that UConn’s career services department also provides coaching for students who complete the program.
Coding skills are certainly in-demand in Connecticut, said Michael Cantor, co-managing partner of Hartford intellectual property law firm Cantor Colburn, and chair of the quasi-public venture fund Connecticut Innovations, which invests heavily in bioscience and tech companies.
Cantor, an advocate for increasing available job training and looking to the tech world as a growth vehicle in Connecticut, said entrepreneurs tell him the lack of tech skills in the state’s workforce hinders their ability to hire here.
“One of the biggest complaints that I’ve heard for a number of years from tech startups in this state is not finding enough qualified employees,” Cantor said. “It’s really critical to the success of Connecticut that we have this supply of coders.”
Competitive field
Infosys, one of the largest tech companies operating in Hartford, is looking for prospective workers capable of full-stack web development, said Jeff Auker, head of technology and innovation at the India-based IT firm’s Hartford hub.
Infosys came to Connecticut three years ago, after public and private sector leaders, including Gov. Ned Lamont, wooed company President Ravi Kumar, who was looking for several cities to base U.S. innovation hubs. While the pandemic emptied out Infosys’ Goodwin Square office space as employees work remotely, the company had about 200 people in Hartford pre-pandemic.
Business has been steady amid COVID-19, Auker said, and Infosys hasn’t slowed its hiring in the state. Kumar currently sits on the state Governor’s Workforce Council.
Auker said Infosys works with state officials on state-level, tech-training programs, and he’s a fan of UConn’s Coding Boot Camp because it teaches the coding skills he looks for in entry-level workers.
“[Infosys has] been actively with … the training programs throughout the state to help guide and craft the curricula in the training programs for the IT skills that we’re all in short supply of,” Auker said, adding that he thinks UConn’s coding program could serve as a significant addition to that tech education effort.
Infosys has directly partnered with Trinity College to help the liberal arts school develop a tech-training program.
However, Matthew Nemerson, former president of the Connecticut Technology Council who currently works for Shelton energy-efficiency tech firm Budderfly, warned that while additional skills training is a good thing, many coding jobs available in Connecticut necessitate deep knowledge and experience, which isn’t possible to develop in a time-limited program.
“The truth is coding is like language skills,” Nemerson said. “If I’m going to hire translators at the United Nations, your language training can’t be high school French.”
Nemerson is an advocate of introducing tech and coding education as part of a regular K-12 curriculum, and said people intent on working as software programmers or web developers should learn basic coding to get their feet wet. But coding is a competitive field, Nemerson said, and people should be clear-eyed about that.
Auker agrees that a training program on its own teaches requisite skills for entry-level employment at Infosys, but he also looks for internships or other real-world experience when hiring. Auker said Connecticut companies should expand internship opportunities for prospective tech workers.
Stafford, the UConn Coding Boot Camp graduate, said he had some on-the-ground knowledge of how coding is used in the real world from working alongside coders as a financial analyst. Right now he’s at a lower level in tech than he was in finance, but he thinks he has room to grow more than would have been possible if he kept working on Wall Street.
“I was heading down a slow descent of my marketability in finance,” Stafford said. “Who knows if the fruits of this change will bear what my previous career did? But it’s a top-rated skill set.”
UConn’s new Coding Boot Camp aims to fill key skills gap in CT economy