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The Iron Yard: Coming to ATL

The Iron Yard: Coming to ATL
The Iron Yard- Fast Company

FastCompany took a look at coding schools and decided that The Iron Yard (coming soon to ATL) is all they hack up to be.

The Background:

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a little over 1 million software developer (1,018,000) jobs in 2012 and expect that number to grow 22% over the next decade.
  • The average annual salary is just shy of $100,000.
  • Hack schools can be big business. Students invest between $3,000 and nearly $18,000 for eight to 10 weeks worth of training. Some never complete the program, have to rely on free online resources such as Codeacademy, and many remain un-employed after graduation.

The Iron Yard:

  • The Iron Yard, a tech accelerator and coworking space in Greenville, SC. has recently launched a coding academy.
  • Their academy grew out of a need to support the startups coming out of their accelerator program.
  • Instructors are fee to move through lessons at the pace of the students (10-20) per class.
  • The don't use slides or a syllabus- only topic based lessons and relaxed assignment requirements.
  • Resume writing workshops and mock interviews are offered to students.
  • Scholarships are offered to female students.

They are Expanding to Atlanta in the Next Few Months:

More from the horse's mouth (John Saddington):
For those within the technology industry and that call it "home" we have to admit the truth - we've got itseriously good! Every industry, whether technology proper or not needs our engineering skillsets and perspective to bring them truckloads of success.

Statistically, there is a huge need for software engineers and not enough of them to go around - in fact, statistically it's been reported that there will be close to 1.5 million engineering jobs with barely 400k of qualified graduates. Talk about a gap that needs to be filled!

Simply put, we need more engineers and I'd like to personally encourage you to consider becoming one - and you don't have to have a technical background to do it! I'm bringing a unique code school to Atlanta in the coming months that I believe is going to be one of the solutions to the growing engineering shortage problem: The Iron Yard.

We're scrappy, with a startup mentality (but a wealth of experience under the hood), and we're hackers (we have enjoyed "hacking hack schools" as Fast Company put it) and have had great success with our previous students.

Here, take a look:

http://vimeo.com/83723333

Read the whole story from Fast Company.

[Photo Credit: The Iron Yard/ Fast Company]

Tricia Whitlock