Change is an inevitable part of any profession. It’s normal to switch jobs every few years—Americans hold an average of 12 jobs across their lifetime—because changing roles is the fastest way for a worker to progress their career and earn higher wages.
But what about a brand-new career change? For many, that can seem more daunting than just finding a new job, especially if you’ve spent your entire career in one industry, honing a specific set of skills. Fortunately, it’s getting easier to make the leap. In fact, labor experts believe that career pivots will only become more prevalent as people seek new opportunities for growth.
Among the various sectors that offer promising prospects for career changers, the tech industry stands out for its competitive wages and benefits. Yet tech employers are currently contending with a shortage of skilled talent. Over the next decade, the tech workforce could grow at twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce, but by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could remain unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified employees to be hired for them. Recruiting talent might be one of the biggest ongoing problems for tech employers, but for career changers, the lack of skilled workers is an opportunity to upskill and pivot into high-demand roles.
Why skills from TripleTen bootcamps matter more than degrees
What matters to hiring managers isn’t whether candidates have a degree, but whether they have the hard and soft skills to succeed in the role. An overwhelming majority of employers (87%) are open to hiring candidates from non-STEM backgrounds for tech-focused roles, according to a survey from TripleTen, the online, part-time bootcamp designed to help students begin careers in tech. This sentiment holds true across various industries, from transportation to hospitality to healthcare: For employers in the IT/tech industry, a majority are either confident (44%) or very confident (49%) in recruiting bootcamp graduates.
In other words, you don’t always need a bachelor’s or a master’s degree to get a tech job in today’s market. A bootcamp background, coupled with a strong portfolio, is sufficient evidence that a candidate has the knowledge to be a suitable hire—as long as the bootcamp is designed to teach the right hard and soft skills.
“What differentiates TripleTen bootcamps from others is that we’re constantly having conversations with employers in our network to figure out what hard skills are in demand,” said Jordan van Leesten, Employer Partnerships Manager at TripleTen. “But there is just as much of an emphasis on the soft skills, such as teamwork, communication, and time management, as there is on a hard skill like coding.”
TripleTen offers skills-specific programs in software engineering, data science, business intelligence analytics, quality assurance, and most recently, cybersecurity—areas of expertise that employers are actively hiring for. According to TripleTen’s employer survey, the most sought-after professionals in the industry are data analysts and web developers, followed by software engineers. TripleTen bootcamps provide the valuable skills that more effectively empower career changes into these fields.
TripleTen will be launching a cybersecurity program on September 26 to address the increasing demand for skilled security analysts. In addition to being one of the fastest-growing jobs in the country, the prevalence of corporate cyberattacks across various industries highlights the need for these roles. To ensure graduates will have industry-ready skills, TripleTen engaged subject matter experts with almost 70 years of cyber security experience ranging from government, private, and educational contexts in roles from entry-level to CISO.
TripleTen’s bootcamp programs are beginner-friendly and can range anywhere from five to ten months. The coursework is split into two- or three-week-long “sprints” for students to dive deep into technical topics. Throughout, they are paired with tutors, experienced engineers and data analysts currently working in those roles, who give them feedback on their work.
How hands-on experience is a metric for expertise
“We really hone our program to make sure that each student can emerge as a top candidate during the hiring process,” van Leesten said. “The course design simulates real working environments. At the end of the day, we want students to have a strong portfolio to demonstrate the depth of their knowledge.”
About 80% of TripleTen students don’t have any tech experience: They enter as healthcare workers, school teachers, service industry professionals, lab techs, or administrators. Graduates also qualify for a money-back guarantee if they don’t secure a job within their field of study within those first six months—a “security blanket,” as van Leesten put it, for their career pivot. As programs are offered on a part-time basis, students don’t have to quit their existing jobs.
Some of TripleTen’s graduates even return to a similar field of work, albeit in a higher-paying, more tech-focused role. Take Evgeniia Unzhakova, who used to be a math teacher in Russia. After immigrating to the US in 2019 with her family, she knew she couldn’t keep teaching and decided to seek out an alternate career path. Unzhakova enrolled into TripleTen’s data science program in 2021. After graduating, Unzhakova returned to education as a research analyst at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she’s applying her data skills to increase enrollment for the college.
Central to TripleTen’s curriculum is the opportunity for students to build their portfolio and get work experience while they are studying. Every graduate has the opportunity to work on at least one externship with companies in TripleTen’s network. “We’re aware that our students want a career switch to be quick and cost-effective,” said van Leesten. “And key to that is experiential learning—the ability to work with career coaches and externship managers to determine the scope of a real-world project.”
Recent students from TripleTen’s data science program, for example, spent five weeks developing and training machine learning models for DataSpeak, using the Python Questions from Stack Overflow dataset to generate prompt answers based on user queries. Others from the software engineering cohort were tasked with creating a support widget for edTonomy’s mobile app, adding elements to allow for customer feedback.
“We see a lot of value in partnering with small and medium-sized businesses,” said van Leesten. “And that’s often where students secure their first jobs, before eyeing a move into Big Tech. Here, students have the chance to interact with company stakeholders and fellow developers, and apply both hard and soft skills beyond the classroom environment.”
Take the leap to change your career today. Learn how TripleTen’s online bootcamp can help you break into tech, no matter where you are in life.
