The Iron Yard is now recruiting for its second Iron Yard Academy class and has an eye on expanding beyond Greenville.
The Academy offers a three-month intensive course in Web coding and design and individual classes. There is not yet a timeline or detailed expansion plan, but the program will start in this region, organizers said.
“We have a lot of cities in mind,” said Eric Dodds, managing director. “We for sure have Atlanta and Charleston on the radar. We’re actively looking for people to hire in those two cities.”
Dodds said the code schools as a business model are proliferating quickly and marketing can be a challenge because a certain level of technical knowledge is needed to understand differences between schools. Although the Iron Yard believes its product can go toe-to-toe with schools in New York and San Francisco, being nearby offers an important advantage.
“They’re definitely not a commodity yet, but as they become commoditized, people will make choices based on convenience,” Dodds said. “Over time it will become harder to draw people from outside Greenville.”
Moving forward, the academy will focus on front-end and back-end engineering and mobile development and is open to students with any level of experience, Dodds said. Aptitude for learning is more important than experience, he said. Back-end and mobile development were added because potential students have expressed interest and employers are also looking to hire those skills as well.
The Iron Yard’s cost-free youth program, CoderDojo, will follow the adult developer class to new communities.
“Our belief is that the gap between the need for people who know code and know how to develop and the people who actually know how to do that is getting wider and wider as we speak,” Dodds said.
“It’s good to train adults who can go directly into the job market, but we need to interact with kids at a younger age and give them the tools to learn this stuff at a younger age so that they have a massive head start, especially if you’re involving kids for whom college might not be an option for financial reasons.”
