Revature, a company based in Virginia, has been slowly setting up classrooms at colleges around the United States to try to recruit Graduate Students to take its course in Coding and hotskills. The company is even paying students to take the class and going a step further by guaranteeing jobs for those who take the college course once they graduate. Could this idea end up catching on as a way for industries that need niche skills or are lacking employees with certain skills?
What exactly is this college course?
The course is an intense 40-hour-week crash course over 12 weeks that teaches coding and hotskills like computer programming, data management and Java. The class is tuition free and graduate students that take it will be paid minimum wage during the course. The one catch involved is that students who take the course and graduate from it must commit to working for Revature for at least two years, hence the guaranteed job part of the offer. Graduates for the company work will end up working as contract software engineers for a variety of organizations like banks, retailers or health insurers.
They will also get an annual salary that is anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000 a year.
Where is it being offered?
Revature set up its first two courses on college campuses back in November 2016, with one class at Arizona State University in Phoenix and the other in Queens College in New York City. They also have a class, complete with complementary company dorm, set up at their company headquarters in Reston, Virginia. Revature says that they are paying around 150 students to take these courses and they hope to see that number double within a year. The company wants to have a class up and running at the University of Missouri in Columbia by June. They also want to have one set up at George Mason University in Fairfax by the end of the year.
The future of training?
Revature is not the first company to offer classes like this in coding, but they are the first ones to try offering them tuition free. This approach has won praise from a few students, college administrators and education experts since it keeps graduate students from having to take out even more student loans. It also helps students get training and then experience in the field, which is crucial since tech employers value it. This continues a recent trend in the increase of Americans that are in formal apprenticeships. The idea does have some risks, since the company will lose its investment if it does not have enough work for its students, or if they leave before the two years to seek greener pastures.