Hire Education Can coding academies survive the AI era?

MATT DAVIS HAD BEEN working as an electrician for 10 years when he decided to make a career change.

- MAX UFBERG

Davis, who lives in Squamish, British Columbia, was earning around $65,000 CAD per year ($49,000 USD)-not a lot for someone supporting a wife and young daughter. Plus, the long hours were getting to him. "The two major factors were financial and work-life balance," he says.

A few of Davis's friends turned him on to the idea of coding boot camps-intensive programs that teach essential skills to people seeking jobs in computer science. Some of Davis's friends had themselves graduated from boot camps-and they were earning twice his salary, despite having fewer years of experience in their fields. Davis, 35, had taken computer science classes in college, so he had at least some idea of what the curriculum might look like. "I already knew I had this interest and capacity for it," he says.

In July 2022, Davis enrolled in a boot camp through Lighthouse Labs, a Canadian for-profit tech education company that offers online training in areas such as language programming, data analytics, and web development. He quit his job as an electrician and took out an $18,000 CAD loan ($13,600 USD) to cover the tuition plus living expenses. Six months later, armed. with a newfound virtuosity in things like JavaScript, Express, and React, he graduated.

Davis wasn't exactly in rarefied air. Since their emergence a little over a decade ago, coding academies for aspiring programmers have become an estimated $1.3 billion industry. More than 600 programs offer courses around the globe. In North America, there are more than 100 academies offering full-time classes, either online or in person, with leading companies like Flatiron School and General Assembly charging around $15,000 on average for courses in everything from front-end web development to cybersecurity engineering. Together, these North American academies offer classes-and the promise of gaining a foothold in the tech industry-to some 25,000 people a year.