How does BloomTech teach the skills you need for a tech job? Our unique approach to learning
Kaseem Bradley had tried coding a few times—first in high school, and later on his own. It never clicked. “I felt like coding was reserved for people that showed an interest early on. And I knew that wasn’t me,” Kaseem remembers. Fortunately, a friend of his who attended BloomTech shared some of the cool projects he was working on in his career—and how much he was making.
Kaseem enrolled in BloomTech. He got the support he needed to learn tech skills, plus the confidence to keep going when he felt overwhelmed. Now Kaseem is working as an application engineer.
“I knew BloomTech was the right fit for me because I saw firsthand the result of BloomTech’s work and curriculum. So I knew it worked,” Kaseem says. “I knew if I applied myself, I’d be able to achieve great things. And I have. BloomTech completely changed my life.”
How to learn the tech skills for your dream career
Without the personalized support to learn the skills needed for a tech job, Kaseem may never have found his dream career.
That’s why we at BloomTech work hard every day: To help people with untapped potential—including you, maybe?—work in tech. We enable people of all backgrounds, no matter their level of tech experience, learn the skills they need for innovative, exciting, and well-paying jobs in technology.
“We know what it takes to get into a well paying tech role. And we know all the support that you'll need along the way,” says Austen Allred, Co-Founder and CEO of BloomTech. “We've helped students in every possible background with every possible level of experience. I’m betting we can help you, too.”
In fact, 53% of BloomTech learners say that they either have no coding experience, or that they’ve tried beginner tutorials on their own. We help them gain the necessary skills for a tech career.
So how, exactly, do we create this direct path to a tech job? How do we break down the barriers to a higher income and better life?
In short: We teach our learners the skills employers want on a flexible schedule, then help them get a job or their money back. Guaranteed. (As you can imagine, terms apply, but that is our promise!)
If you’re considering a career in tech, you’ll want more details. Good! Read on to learn more about how we prepare BloomTech learners for jobs in tech, then help them kickstart their dream career.
Understand what employers need, then teach those skills
When we design our curriculum, we don’t start with textbooks or a long list of prerequisites that you might find in a college setting. No, we want to enable you to start your tech career faster.
So we begin with what employers want and need.
Through market surveys, conversations with employers, partnerships with hiring companies, discussions with BloomTech alumni working in the field, and more, we gain a solid understanding of what companies need in their employees.
We reverse engineer our programs to meet these needs. Our courses teach the knowledge and provide hands-on experience to practice the most in-demand skills for tech roles.
Unlike other programs, BloomTech courses cover all the bases of what employers look for:
1. Technical Competency
Project-based learning is incorporated throughout all BloomTech programs. Hands-on assignments help learners gain the right skills and create projects for a portfolio. Our graduates share these projects with potential employers and talk about them in interviews to demonstrate their job qualifications.
BloomTech Labs is one example of our commitment to hands-on learning. During this section of their program, BloomTech learners work on teams to build real products for real clients. They apply all the technical skills they’ve learned to solve pressing problems for mission-driven organizations.
“It was a priceless experience in terms of going into the job hunt,” says Dominick Sallustro, who studied web development at BloomTech and now works as a software engineer. “It was a sneak peek of what it’s going to be like working at a tech company.”
Other programs teach just enough to get their graduates ready to be trained, or to get internships. BloomTech graduates finish our programs with the technical skills to thrive in roles like software developer, data scientist, and backend engineer. They’re prepared to start working right away.
Employers are thrilled with the quality of workers they hire from BloomTech.
“BloomTech has been sending quality graduate candidates our way. That has really helped our engineering hiring pipeline,” says Ben Fruehman, VP of Data and Analytics at Zotec Partners, which has hired multiple BloomTech alumni. “The candidates are well-prepared and qualified for the roles to which they are applying. And the team members we have hired from BloomTech are really flourishing on our team!”
2. Professional Skills
Other programs teach technical skills but neglect professional skills (also called “soft skills”). That’s not how we roll. We teach professional skills so our graduates get great jobs—and succeed long-term in their tech careers.
Let’s look at just a few of the professional skills learners gain at BloomTech.
- Teamwork. Learners work together to build products, adopting roles—such as frontend engineer, UX engineer, technical project manager, machine learning engineer—just like they’ll do in their future jobs.
- Communication. Communication was recently identified as the most in-demand “soft skill,” according to a LinkedIn study. BloomTech learners practice communicating throughout their programs, e.g. while pair programming and when presenting to stakeholders in BloomTech Labs.
- Professional tools. Throughout their time at BloomTech, learners use tools and platforms such as JIRA, Slack, Trello, and GitHub, among others. Our graduates finish with a fluency in some of the most-used tools in the industry—ready to dive into work in their post-graduation jobs.
- Critical thinking and problem solving
Critical thinking and problem solving are popular buzzwords these days. It’s one thing to put them on your resume; it’s another to be able to demonstrate these vital skills to a potential employer.
BloomTech courses teach these skills in a way that directly translates to learners’ future jobs. Everything you do in a BloomTech program—from projects you complete and live instruction to coaching and job hunt support—aligns with what you’ll be doing on the job.
Our live Code-Alongs are one such way learners learn by doing. Our industry expert instructors “pull back the curtain” to show how they solve real problems. They explain how they approach a challenge, then demonstrate building a solution. All the while, learners follow along, line by line of code.
In one example of our live Code-Alongs, an instructor and learners train an algorithm to detect COVID-19. They use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to analyze a real sample of lung scans.
Each Code-Along provides another real-world way of applying and practicing the skills they will use on the job. They’re not only practicing technical skills but also gaining the critical thinking and problem solving necessary to work in tech.
We train you for tech jobs, no matter your background
You just read about all the skills BloomTech teaches. You now understand our hands-on approach to helping learners gain these technical, professional, and critical thinking skills.
If you’re like many people, you may be wondering if you have what it takes to succeed at BloomTech. Here’s the great news: We specialize in enrolling learners of all backgrounds—including those with little or no coding experience. We help them learn all these necessary skills to launch a rewarding career in tech.
Ready to take the next step toward your dream career? Find out how our courses in Full Stack Web Development, Data Science, and Backend Development can teach you the skills employers need.
