HackerRank: Hiring managers eye coding boot camp grads

Dive Brief:

As tech becomes more central to business operations across industries, the global demand for software developers has increased, drawing a larger cross-section of people into coding boot camps, according to a Feb. 4 HackerRank report. Because of this, the report said, employers are changing their strategies for vetting and hiring talent.
The report also found that hiring managers are increasingly looking to hire coding boot camp graduates; nearly 1 in 6 respondents from Gen Z said they've learned from a coding boot camp. Thirty-two percent of hiring managers said they've hired someone who has graduated from a boot camp, and 72% of managers said they make better hires.
"Using success metrics like a degree from a four year university has never been the best way to evaluate developers' skills," said Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank's co-founder and CEO, in a news release. "As the competition to hire developers becomes more and more fierce, companies need better ways to tune into what developers actually know, and what they really want in a job."

Dive Insight:

Coding boot camps appear to be on the rise. Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering and 2U's Trilogy Education announced in July a new boot camp for teaching front- and back-end development skills to Baltimore-area working professionals and adult learners. The program was launched in response to 36,000 unfilled jobs requiring coding skills in the city's area.

The University of Oregon also announced the opening of a coding boot camp in 2018. Like John Hopkins' boot camp, the University of Oregon's 24-week program was aimed at teaching working professionals and adult learners the basics of coding, data structure and algorithms and offers intensive training in JavaScript and other coding languages. Both schools partnered with 2U's Trilogy Education — the winner of HR Dive's 2019 Employee Initiative of the Year award — to launch the boot camps.

Liberty Mutual Insurance developed an in-house coding boot camp to meet its need for software developers and to avoid recruiting hassles. More companies may follow Liberty's example by launching their own coding boot camps and other in-house training programs.

Clarification: This story has been updated to provide a more specific statistic for the number of hiring managers who prefer boot camp graduates to other hires based on the report.