Code Institute

I recently completed the the Diploma in Full Stack Development. It took me about 1 year to complete. I found the course fantastic from start to finish. The content and delivery was great. Be prepared to work hard - you have to put in the hours but it's well worth it. I did the course via UCD and got some support via Skillnet - I felt it was great value for money given the volume of the course. I did the course to upskill in programming rather than career change - I got exactly what I wanted out of it. I would highly recommend it.

I just completed Code Institute’s e-commerce path and the past year has been very impactful for me. The course was fully remote and I’ve been impressed throughout the course of how this was handled as it’s not easy to put together content, support, and networking opportunities for people across borders and in different time zones. 

I am very satisfied with the outcome, and although you can technically learn all of this via other (free) paths you will not have the same support, nor a diploma to show to future employers. The standards they expect you to follow are strict, but fair, and just the fact that you have the purchase of the course + expectations + deadlines weighing on you will push you to reach your goals. You have plenty of support and I never experienced poor or delayed feedback to my questions or concerns. After completing the course you have it on paper that you can create fully functional full stack e-commerce applications in line with university/industry standards.

The content is very engaging and helpful and they give you a clear path to your goal. They don’t teach you everything (you find out during the course that it would pretty much be impossible), but they give you the tools you need in videos, quizzes, and exercises, and they have a ton of slack groups that are really helpful. Also, they offer a lot of courses on LinkedIn, job hunting in general, and share job posts all over Europe every day.

About the negative:
On a personal note I started to feel the solitude a bit, but that we mostly due to me doing the course over a year. You can do it in a few months, and that would probably have been better. In any case you have to get used to mostly everything being via text or video, so whenever you have a questions you have to be prepared to be proactive, search the Slack forums for info, and always type out and post your problem(s) instead of explaining them in person. You get used to this, but if you do the course over a year you may start to miss face to face interactions.

Also be aware that the company is based in Dublin and the careers team is mostly engaged in the UK. They will share job posts from different countries but the majority of them are in the UK. This is just a little side note and did not subtract from all the other great content they had.

Overall:
I would definitely recommend this course to anyone who is interested in learning how to code. You start from scratch and work your way up to understand complicated flows to produce and realise a plethora of projects. I can only speak for myself but I at least feel confident in starting a junior developer position with the knowledge I now have.

Once you pay them the €6k, you are never seeing that money again. Even if you don't enjoy the course, or find it useful, you'll never see the money again.

Even the biggest guru's & scammers in the tech field selling courses like this give refunds at any time - because customers are the backbone of any business.

The minute you pay them, that $ is going straight back into their marketing budget so they can rope in another innocent person through their YouTube ads, get them on a sales call with a slimy salesperson - selling a fake dream.

The mentors they hire to help students are a joke. It's actually funny how bad they are. 

Code Institute makes a lot of promises but are yet to deliver. The content is subpar to a lot of free content on YouTube. 

There is a very little chance you will succeed from doing this course.

Code Institute caters a quality education for Software Development. It's been an amazing experience with student care, tutor support, mentors, job facilitator and Code Institute team! They never fail me whenever I reach out and needed help. They never give up motivating students and give every help they could offer until you can finally make it! There are Hackathons too for their students to develop skills and experience working with developers and co students. Well done Code Institute team. Highly recommended!

A year ago I decided to change my career and become a programmer. I couldn't have chosen a better guide to take me along this path than the Code Institute. A very professional program helped me understand the secrets of coding. Here theory meets practice! The team of professionals at Code Institute were very helpful and interested in my progress. Tips from mentors and tutor support helped me solve problems and create "real" applications.
Career Hub, which is a great team that helps in finding a job and preparing for interviews, deserves attention.
The course is very flexible! I studied and worked full time.
It was hard work, but it was definitely worth it!

Firstly – I apologise for the novel. This is only the highlights from the issues I and my class faced while attending a course with this college. All issues can be backed with evidence if requested. I would like to convey very clearly that I am exceptionally unimpressed with this course. I have found it far below the standards that I would expect from a course partnered with UCD (well technically UCD Professional Academy). Furthermore, I feel the cost of €7995 cannot possibly be justified given the poor quality of the teaching and the course material itself. I would strongly recommend you do not partake in this course. There are so many other Bootcamps and code course out there. Don't let the fact that this course is partnered with UCD or supposedly has "college accreditation" mislead you.  Changing assessment criteria while students are actively working on the projects in question (initially without telling the applicable students). When this was raised a response of "simplifying assessment criteria to inflate pass rates is acceptable because employers will not know and it is done all the time in third level education"... This, in my opinion, is just wrong and confirms that this certificate will not have any real industry value.  Course content issues:- Recommended tools do not provide sufficient functionality for merit/distinction grading (ie using github projects as a full Agile project management tool for linking epics to user stories to tasks and bugs)- Much of the content is almost a carbon copy of that found on freecodecamp and codcademy sites- Walkthrough code supplied on the college GitHub, doesn’t align with the video project walkthroughs and often has errors which are detrimental to the operation of the program- Numerous spelling errors and typos across the online content- When a student does raise a bug/issue/typo, there is no open communication, instead defensive responses, (therefore personally I have ceased to raise defects/bugs) The Masterclass promise was: “…there will be 8 x 7.5 hour Masterclass sessions to complement your online learning. The first seven sessions are hackathons, designed to develop your practical competencies, challenge your problem-solving abilities and advance your understanding of the concepts that you are learning. Each session aligns with one of the mini-projects within the course…”Only the first Masterclass included a hackathon, all others contained a limited morning of "lectures" followed by an afternoon of "time to work on our projects". Facilitation courses- Contained lectures which regurgitated course content, not the class discussions/learning sessions promised- One class didn't even occur, it was rescheduled after the fact. Mentoring sessions. Promised at 1hr each. Halfway through the course these were reduced to 30 mins. I was lucky, my mentor, who no longer works with CI, was amazing, but I have heard so many horror stories from fellow students. Tutor support- This is a text based message service that you can only avail of if you use Gitpod (the college recommended developer platform)- Spent almost 2 hours on the line to troubleshoot an issue, the initial agent couldn't help me and was only "online for another 15mins" so put me back to the queue. Left the call with no answer (took a Dev at my day job 5mins to trouble shoot the issue)- Next time I tried to use Tutor support I was informed I had used up my Allowed time and took over an hour to receive a response, after another hour without response I decided it was a waste of time.(issue was determined to be with Gitpod, all issues stopped once I started using VS Code)- Unless you develop your project exactly as per the video examples, tutor support cannot help you The college does not understand the difference between Unit tests and automated/manual functional testing. This is a developer course that does not require the creation of unit tests, but will fail you if you do not breach Facebook T&Cs and create a fake Facebook Business page for a project... During the process of dealing with my complaint (yes, I raised all of these issues with the "college" in a process that took months) they appointed an individual to be a Cohort Coordinator for UCD. A meeting was requested and agreed and then the Cohort Coordinator failed to respond/confirm/attend. I was passed around until I reached the Customer Relations Manager for UCD Professional Academy. During this call, the manager admitted that mistakes have been made with this course and that the level of service provided has not met the expectations of any party involved, and an offer was made for a €1,000 refund and the ability to attend a different course (neither of which I accepted). During this call the Cohort Coordinator made false accusation of "Aggressive" messaging (which are unfounded, and I am more than happy to provide proof) and informed me I should cease to use the group channels when asking questions (even if the questions effect other students). To make such an accusation during a complaint resolution call is deflective and inappropriate. It goes to show how little Code Institute care about its students and how inexperienced the company is as a whole. From my experience, most of the students that are employed after completing this course, are employed directly by the college. Do not let the partnership with UCD fool you. This course is definitely not value for money. It is not consistent in its assessments and all of the content can be learnt elsewhere for free, or for a small fee if you prefer a more structured approach.

I'm currently nearing the end of my studies with Code Institute, and it's been an incredible journey! I'd never written a line of code in my life, and less than a year later, I'm working as a full time developer! The Hackathons are absolutely invaluable, I highly recommend them! They always have fantastic themes (including one where we were tasked to build a retro game), and you learn so much from doing them. Each team has a mix of abilities, so there's always something new to learn, either from more experienced teammates, or from teaching those who are less experienced. Honestly, I can't recommend it enough!!