A new coding bootcamp is filling the talent gap in Vancouver

When it comes to our economy, where does B.C. stand? Is this the promised land, or no man’s land? How are today’s economic conditions going to affect our jobs, our savings or our decisions for our future? Resources, technology and all these different sectors are evolving around us and affecting our economy and our lifestyle choices.

In partnership with CKNW, Vancity Buzz is on board to put our economy under the microscope during the second instalment of Putting B.C. To Work.

CKNW’s Drex spoke with Charlyne Fothergill, the Director of Career Services at Lighthouse Labs about their coding bootcamp, the coding industry and coding jobs in B.C.

Lighthouse Labs is supplying the tech industry in Vancouver with talented website designers and coders, one junior developer at a time.

They offer an intensive eight-week course for web and mobile software development. The placement rate? One hundred per cent. The starting pay? Anywhere from $36,000 to $66,000 per year. Senior developers can make up to $120,000 per year. Not bad for an eight-week course.

But this is no normal program. Students are expected to put in 60 to 80 hours per week in order to develop the skills they need to get a job by Week 9. Talk about a brain buster, but past graduates have gotten jobs with the likes of HootSuite, Mobify, TELUS and Nike.

And the job market is only getting better. “The startup scene here in Vancouver is also a very big focus of where our developers go,” says Fothergill.

Lighthouse Labs has three different programs offered every one to two months, which is great if you want to get on with it already.

What does it take to be a coder?

1. Passion for coding. Do you get excited when you hear words like XCode and Objective-C language?

2. Creativity. Do you dream of building websites that are responsive, interactive and feel like a beautiful house you’d like to live in?

3. Ambition. Are you willing to eat, breathe and sleep coding?

4. Enjoy a challenge. Coding is about as non-static as you can get when it comes to careers, and just when you think you’ve mastered it, a new way of doing things will come along. Hey, you may even be the one to invent it, which goes back to ambition.

CKNW’s special series, Putting B.C. To Work runs until April 26. Follow along on Vancity Buzz as we continue to post interviews throughout the series and tune into CKNW AM 980 every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.