Dive Brief:

• A new coding boot camp announced last week by Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering and 2U's Trilogy Education will teach front- and back-end development skills to working professionals and adult learners in the Baltimore, Maryland, area.
• Last year more than 36,000 jobs in the Baltimore area that required at least some coding ability went unfilled, Trilogy Education said.
• The program will run for 24 weeks beginning September 2019 and will include two three-hour evening classes during the week and a four-hour class on Saturdays. The program's curriculum will cover coding basics including training on algorithms and data structure, in addition to the web programming languages HTML, CSS and JavaScript, among others. Students will also perform a minimum of 20 hours on homework and outside projects, and they will build a professional portfolio, Trilogy Education said. Participants who complete the program will receive a certificate in full-stack web development from Johns Hopkins.

Dive Insight:

This program is responding to a demonstrated need in the area by trying to fill jobs that were left open because of talent and experience gaps. Boot camps are one of the many formats organizations have employed in order to train skilled technical talent.

The Johns Hopkins partnership isn't 2U's first. The company struck a similar collaboration with the University of Oregon via Trilogy Education, and has also teamed up with WeWork to bring educational programs to the company's co-working locations. A boot camp partnership between Microsoft and coding program General Assembly announced in May focused on training 15,000 workers across 22 U.S. campuses over the next three years. Other employers are putting an in-house spin on boot camps. Liberty Mutual's program will train current employees in software development.

Though an estimated 25% of student developers are self-taught coders, according to research by HackerRank, there is still a place for formal programs in the tech training space. Some programs can help to expand talent pools to those who may have been excluded from the job market previously, including formerly incarcerated individuals.

Additionally, such programs may help employers bridge internal skill gaps faster, improving growth and retention. As technology advances, educators, businesses and governments may need to up collaboration in order to prepare for the workforce needs of the future.