There’s a digital skills gap in the Ottawa labour market, and Carleton’s Sprott School of Business and Trilogy Education are aiming to bridge it.
Starting this February, the first cohort of Carleton’s coding boot camp will begin their 24-week journey through a part-time training program in web application development, culminating with a certificate from the university.
Ottawa companies had a hard time filling more than 6,000 coding-related jobs over the last year, according to analytics software company Burning Glass, despite IT being one of the fastest-growing job sectors in Canada.
The director of Professional Services at Carleton, Calvin Tong, saw an opportunity to square this regional skills gap in Ottawa.
“By collaborating with Trilogy, boot camp participants get access to a rigorous, market-driven curriculum taught by instructors who have worked in the tech industry and comprehensive career services,” Tong said.
By 2021, around 88,000 information and communications technology jobs will be created in Ontario which will create plenty of job opportunities for boot camp graduates, according to the Information and Communications Technology Council outlook.
Trilogy itself has conducted programs like this with 50 universities around the world, including Columbia and UC Berkeley.
“We partner with universities that are in markets where we see a skills gap,” a Trilogy spokesperson said. “We help the university run skills-focused boot camps that are designed to help people, who may not have much of a background in technology, get to a place where they have a portfolio and a foundational skill set so they can get hired into tech jobs.”
Current students are not banned from applying, but the typical full-time student might be hard-pressed to accommodate an extra pair of 3-hour night classes, a 4-hour weekend class, and an additional 20 hours of homework.
However, Carleton students said they welcome this new program with open arms.
“It’s good for the school, it’s good for Ottawa,” said Owen Darragh, a first-year physics student. “I know people who have parents that don’t really enjoy their jobs or would like to get out of where they currently are, and if they knew how to code, that would be a great booster on their résumé.”
Kara Scott, a 30-year-old biology student completing her third degree, shared a similar opinion.
“Everybody has parents at this age who didn’t grow up with the opportunities that we had in terms of technology,” Scott said.
Zara Shah, president of the Sprott Business Students’ Society, said she likes the idea that programs like this might be available to her in the future, even after she has completed her degree.
“I think having a program like this for people already in their professional careers kind of gives you that peace of mind,” she said. “It just opens more doors for us.”
Whether or not this forthcoming boot camp piques a personal interest, the program’s mandate appears to offer a collaborative solution to the local supply and demand problem.
“I think it’s definitely a gap that needed filling,” Shah added, “and I’m glad that Sprott was the one to take the opportunity to do this.”
Featured image by Spencer Colby.
