January 3, 2025
Since starting my journey as a UX designer, I’ve completed two bootcamp-style courses in the last three years. I’ve learned a lot from these courses, and one offered additional job search aid following course completion. I’ve made some great friends and peers — people I’ve worked with in the years since — and I still reach out to some of my course mentors for advice. But in some ways, entering the workforce felt like a rude awakening from the academic bubble.
The bootcamp industry has grown rapidly since the pandemic. According to CareerKarma’s State of the Bootcamp Market 2023, bootcamp graduates grew 32.17% in 2021, then 25.13% in 2022. For someone unemployed in the middle of a pandemic, the remote, daily classes from Thinkful were a great way to learn and fill the time. After I got a job, MITxPRO’s flexible schedule and weekly meetings were ideal for striking a balance with work. These courses do exceedingly well at meeting the scheduling needs of prospective customers while promising the ability to join the workforce with new skills or a new career.
Let’s start with the positive: with a background in music and a smidge of coding, I had virtually no experience in UX when I enrolled in Thinkful’s course, nor did I have much game design knowledge when I signed up for MITxPRO. Both were great at creating a strong foundation of terminology and practical work, like prototyping and sketching. They also introduced students to at least one piece of industry-standard software, like Figma and Unity Engine. My classmates and I also learned the fundamental processes of both skills, so we had a formulaic idea of how to design UX or a game from start to finish.
As I mentioned, I also fostered great connections with my classmates and teachers. They’ve written some of my recommendations on LinkedIn, worked with me on game jams and longer projects, traded advice, and reviewed portfolios and case studies. My mentor at Thinkful was an early job reference, going so far as to recommend me for a job at his old firm. I was lucky in both programs: I had a relatively small class size (no more than 20 people), whereas most bootcamp cohorts have classes larger than 50 students.
These bootcamps create a strong foundation for students to reskill or pivot to new careers, but they lack the necessary steps to transition from academia to the real world. My next post will discuss how my bootcamp experience left me feeling unprepared.
