Here’s the short story (full details are below)
In order to comply with state licensing requirements, we are making updates to our job placement program in some states. This is primarily a difference in the way we communicate about job placement—we aren’t legally allowed to offer a placement guarantee to students. For us and our students, though, that won’t change our commitment to having the best career-support possible and job placement for all of our students. In fact, we’ve decided to raise the bar for ourselves by offering even more ongoing career support and training for students who graduate from The Iron Yard.
Full details are below and we encourage you to read more about licensing and education. As always, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions at all.
Code Schools, State Licensing, Job Placement and You
Part of our mission at The Iron Yard is helping people launch new careers in technology. Here’s how we explain that in our mission statement: “We are committed to training the highest-quality developers and startups in the world, both in skill and in character. Our mission is to find people who want to pursue the craft and life-long adventure of technology, teach them the tools of the trade, and then release them into the world with the drive and capability to make a difference.”
Part of that commitment relates specifically to jobs. When we launched the school we decided to draw a line in the sand and guarantee that our grads got job offers or their tuition back. It was a way to keep us honest to our commitment as well as keep the bar incredibly high. In our “playbook” for new employees, here’s how we explain that decision:
First and foremost, the job guarantee keeps us honest and forces us to put our money where our mouth is. The question for us is simple: either we can train job-ready engineers or we can’t. We won’t accept anything less than excellence, so the answer is that we can train job ready engineers and we’re willing to prove it—that or give someone their money back if we don’t deliver. Having a very clear measure of success establishes our benchmark for quality.
Second, we truly desire to lower the barriers people face in starting a career in programming. If someone is a working professional and they want to learn to code and get a job in a short amount of time, their options are very limited. Online education isn’t deep enough for most and self-study on nights and weekends can take a very long time. Traditional 2-4 year training programs are expensive, time-consuming and worse, out of date. Our school is the cheapest, quickest, lowest-risk way to launch a career in programming. That’s something to be proud of!
So far we are proud to say that we have lived up to that commitment having never issued a tuition refund based on an inability to find a job. In other words, every student who has fully participated in our job placement program has gotten a job in the field.
Another part of our commitment to students is working to become officially licensed as an educational institution in every state where we operate. In fact we’ve had a team working on licensing since we started expansion. We want to ensure that students are confident in their commitment to us. So what does being a licensed educational institution mean, exactly?
For any organization offering formal education, there are state rules created for the protection of a student as a consumer, put in place to make sure that we as an organization have worked with the state commission(s) to understand expectations and operate in a manner consistent with those expectations. As you might expect, that is a good thing. Many “schools” have taken advantage of large numbers of people by accepting tuition fees—often in the form of federal loans with no regard for student debt—and not providing the education or opportunities they said they would. Graduation rates at those schools are abysmal and career support is virtually non-existent, revealing the unfortunate reality that some people selling education are more interested in money than actually helping people.
We welcome transparency and consumer protection. Guidelines for official certificates, refunds and other policies help make everything crystal clear for everyone involved.
Unfortunately, the process works the other way as well—sometimes state guidelines keep us from doing things we’d like to do for our students. In almost all cases, state licensing organizations have a rule against using the word “guarantee” in messaging, or even implying that placement in a job is promise. That might be an issue for some and semantics aside we’re fine with the word-change—this doesn’t alter our commitment to prepare our students for junior level, software development roles and we will continue to strive to maintain our track record of success.
For us, evidence will always be more important than wording, and that’s why we invite curious parties to connect directly with our graduates to hear their stories of success.
What does this mean for students who enrolled under the “guarantee” program?
The guarantee is still in full effect.
What are the details of our career support program?
When you are accepted to The Iron Yard Academy, you join a family that extends far beyond your individual class or campus. Our code school and accelerator graduates comprise a national network of tech professionals, giving you access to people and companies in almost every sphere of the industry.
If you choose to enroll in the career support program, we’re committed to helping you get where you want to go. Every student who has fully participated our process has gotten a job in the field. Here are the details:
- Our careeer support program requires active participation from both our students and our staff. As we said above, our support is individualized and focused and we require the same of our graduates.
- Throughout the semester our staff walks students through a curriculum that lays the foundations of understanding job postings, interviews and hiring processes in the tech industry. We cover what goes into great portfolios, cover letters, communication and project management. Through all of those components we focus on empathy as it applies to all parts of a job in programming.
- In each city, we involve companies and their key staff (many from our Employer Advisory Boards) who guest lecture, conduct mock interviews, facilitate in hackathons, advise on final projects and join us at a Iron Pints throughout the program. This allows both our students and employers to get to know each other before the program is even over.
- Upon graduation, our students have built an impressive body of work as proof of their skill and have developed the skills needed to search for and interview for jobs.
- After the program ends, the work of finding work begins. This is a collaborative effort between our staff and the student. We help our grads build out a job-application toolkit that they can adapt to fit various opportunities. This allows them to rapidly create high-quality cover letters, portfolios and answers to questions, meaning they can pursue a large number of opportunities in a short amount of time.
- We have relationships with employers—local and national—who are interested in hiring our students and provide job opportunities, apprenticeships and internships for them. At the same time, we require students to (and support them in) quickly building out a top-notch portfolio and identifying job opportunities that interest them. (Our most successful grads apply to more than 20 jobs per week post-graduation.) Wherever needed our staff provides personalize guidance and recommendations.
- For students who choose to freelance, we provide project guidance and introductions to opportunities for work when available.
We are going above and beyond just your first job offer. We are currently building out ongoing edcuation materials on advanced topics so that as you progress in your career you can have continued access to proven resources from The Iron Yard. We’re also laying the groundwork for an alumnit mentorship network, ongoing access to our staff, alumni events and more. Your first gig is just the first step—we want your relationship with The Iron Yard to provide ongoing value as you progress in your career.
We believe in what we do and our program is extremely selective, so if we can’t produce the right result, someone’s doing something wrong.
We’re here to help and answer any questions you have. We are committed to transparency, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.
