LEARN Academy

I am a recent graduate of Learn Academy and here is how I honestly feel about the Bootcamp. I find very important work with good people who care and want success for others and this Bootcamp is definitely that. I am not going to sugarcoat this because this Bootcamp was not easy for me and I definitely spent many hours of studying prior and after sessions. What I love most about learn Academy was the people who are running the program from the CEO to the instructors and their partner companies. They hire awesome people to work with and they really care about people's success.  

Prior to learn I did research on what BootCamp I wanted to attend and I actually tried to attend one of the big name bootcamp but I did not like it at all because it was nothing like Learn Academy. It was huge size of classes and it was not personal at all. Learn Academy on the other hand his build for smaller size classes and people are able to connect and make connections with others who are attending the program. If you are thinking about attending this Bootcamp I would recommend you study on your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript and watch some videos on react and Ruby on Rails. I think this would make your life easier when attending the program because it’s high pace and there’s a lot going on so you want be able to keep up.  I had great experience at Learn Academy and I plan to be a part of this awesome community and staying in touch.  

When deciding on which coding bootcamp there are several key factors when need to consider, and in this review, I will explain those key factors and how LEARN Academy proved to be the best professional educational decision for my goals. 

• In-person vs. online: I started my LEARN Academy cohort in February 2020 and for better or worse was able to experience both the in-class and online (Zoom - remote) version of LEARN Academy as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an ideal world, one should attend the in-person experience in order to further solidify friendships within your cohort, the teamwork aspect of being able to discuss code in-person with a whiteboard, and just the general fun of being able to walk around the classroom with a Kombucha in your hand and see what your peers are code. Nonetheless halfway through my bootcamp, we pivoted to remote and we didn’t skip a beat. I feel that all aspects of the curriculum were maintained and we were even able to quickly start utilizing important digital tools more heavily (Git, Slack, VS Code Liveshare) that are fundamental for remote dev work in the future anyway. Overall “in-person” I feel is ideal for learning, but LEARN was super successful in replicating the “in-person” experience online. 
• Internship: The internship is a TREMENDOUS value add for choosing LEARN Academy. I had the opportunity to join a company and work alongside 5 developers at a fast-growing startup in San Diego (keep in mind I started to learn to code just 15 weeks prior). My internship was extended and I continued to work for 10 months at the same company gaining practical coding experience every day. I was hired as a contract worker with no benefits, but nonetheless, it was an invaluable experience to work on actual production code. The internship is guaranteed for 4 weeks but I would say ⅓ of my cohort was asked to extend for 1 or more months and they were also paid for their extensions and were able to put actual development work on their resumes. 
• Tech Stack: The tech stack I learned while at learn was React, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, and Postgresql. All of these technologies are widely used today and if you are new to the industry they serve as a solid foundation to grow from. My internship was entirely in Vue but I used my React foundational skills I learned at LEARN to rapidly learn the basics of Vue (over the weekend from when my classroom experience ended and internship began the following Monday). 
• Quality of teaching instruction: During my course, I had three daily instructors committed to my cohort ~6 to 1 student to teacher ratio (they pivot the number of instructors based on class size). All in all the teachers I had were able to meet me at my learning level and explain complex concepts into more easily digestible content. They were ALWAYS available to answer questions and held office hours. Like most things in life you get what you put in, so make sure you ask questions all the time and ASK for help when you need it. We also had an excellent Professional Development week, led by the Career Services Manager, and in addition, had access to other developers at several of the dev agencies that were in the same building. If my instructors didn’t immediately know the answer to my question or debug my problem they were able to get back to me with my answer in a timely manner. In addition, we had various guest speakers and panels (from the SD tech scene) which made class each week super interesting. 
• Prep Materials: The best resource that LEARN offers in terms of preparation for the bootcamp is their JumpStart weekend. I highly highly highly recommend you participate in that weekend as that was the defining experience that made me decide whether I liked to code and whether I had the confidence in myself to pick up skills quickly over a short period of time. I went into my cohort with about 2 weeks of prior Javascript training and the JumpStart weekend but it was really not enough. I highly recommend people begin studying at least 3 months prior to your cohort (I fully realize that is easier said than done, with life and work, but anyone who came in with prior coding knowledge in my cohort accelerated their learning 2x-5x compared to myself who just wrote my first line of code 14 days before my first day of class.) 
• Facilities: LEARN Academy classroom was GORGEOUS in Union Co-work near Petco Park in downtown SD. Unfortunately, I could only attend for 8 weeks due to COVID but the surrounding made you feel like a true web developer in the chic industrial glass-lined classroom. Also the free Kombucha, coffee, tea, and beer (after hours) wasn’t too bad! They also have two main classrooms so we were frequently able to do check-out (sharing what you learned) at the end of the day and learn what the other cohort who started before us was working on that day.
• Community: The LEARN Academy Community is the most vibrant tech career pivoter/bootcamp community in San Diego hands-down. Pre-COVID LEARN held bi-monthly meetups in its classrooms, celebratory cohort get-togethers, project demo days, and evening guest speakers. Now the community of course has shifted remote, but the online Slack community is also super active. On Day 1 you are welcomed into the Slack group and tons of people who were in your shoes starting the bootcamp who now have fancy developer jobs in the San Diego area (and beyond) are willing to help answer your questions and refer you to positions. Once you are a LEARN alum you enter a network of tech leaders at major tech companies throughout San Diego/California and beyond. One additional thing (which I think they still do), is if you want they pair you with another LEARN grad to serve as your Mentor. To this day (Jan 2021) I still meet with my Mentor each week and he has been an invaluable resource post bootcamp for skill development, motivation, and job search help..
• Growth Areas for LEARN: 1) Improvements to my experience include a more clear path of what milestones I needed to achieve in my coding skills before being ready for Day 1 of the bootcamp. I was provided resources but had no idea where to start. I believe that they are now offering propriety prep materials to new students (I just haven’t reviewed them as they were not available to me when I started) 2)Focus more curriculum time on unit testing. We learned Jest Javascript testing (for maybe 1.5 weeks) I feel like it is a critical developer skill that I personally did not pick up quickly and should be prioritized earlier.  3)Introduce earlier data structures and algorithms into the curriculum, as many technical interviews nowadays focus heavily on them. Overall at the end of the day with 12 weeks to go from 0 to junior dev I understand it is tough to squeeze it all in, regardless LOTS of personal self-study is necessary to keep up with the pace of the class if you come in with no prior coding skills.

Overall, there are plenty more points to speak about when speaking about LEARN but at the end of the day after three months of classroom instruction, I was successfully contributing to an agile development team at a tech company in San Diego. The process to prepare for the bootcamp, take the bootcamp, and perform at your internship is INTENSE. The skills to learn to code is like learning a foreign language you constantly need to have a growth mindset and practice, practice, practice. 10 months after my bootcamp I am still growing and learning each day and that never changes. You must have it within yourself to persevere, be a self-starter, and make many many many personal, financial, and family sacrifices to have a chance at getting a junior developer position in 2021. With that being said LEARN is the most well-rounded and experienced resource available in the San Diego area to place your faith in to prepare you for a successful life-changing career pivot. 

LEARN Academy is such a great Bootcamp. The way this Bootcamp is run makes learning fun, easy, and stress-free. I was laid off during the pandemic and it was a no-brainer to make the decision to join LEARN Academy and invest in myself. Even though I had to help my kids during the last of their 2nd-grade year in school, I was able to review lectures I missed within hours and be back up to speed the same day. Not only did we learn different programming languages we also learned how to conduct a technical interview and practiced each week, we even had an entire week devoted to professional development that prepares us for our job hunt. But the most valuable benefit is the 1 month guaranteed internship. The entire experience was seamless and enjoyable, it really is a community you want to be a part of. 

Pros: Nice location, instructors are nice.  1. The only saving grace for this program is that you get to intern for a company and get real work experience. A lot of the people I met had great internships (myself included) where I learned more than in 3~ weeks than I did in the 3 months I spent at LEARN. You can build great connections with your internship boss and use that to branch out and find work.    Cons:  1. Instructors are all alumni from this program. All 3 instructors graduated less than 2 years ago and now they are in charge of teaching the new cohorts how to code. When I asked Hillary (the person who "interviews" you before you officially start the program) who the instructors would be she responded, "The instructor is someone who has 15+ years of experience in this field and is very knowledgeable" only later to find out that he retired and taught us maybe 1 course out of the entire class.  The "lead" instructor was this guy who looked high all the time and had no idea what he was talking about. And about 90% of all lectures were done by the Associate Instructors (again alumni who graduated with less than 2 years of actual developer experience. Some of then never actually got a job and just got hired back so LEARN could inflate their hired numbers) When asking questions, instructors often times would say "Let me get back to you" and never really get back to you with a coherent answer. Often times during lectures, there were students who would correct the "instructors" because they were making errors or doing something incorrectly.    2. Job Hire.  In my initial interview with Hillary, I asked what the success rate was for students. She told me that the percentage of all alumni was around 84%~. I asked specifically about the previous cohorts and still got that same number. Fast-forward to "Professional Development Week", the career coach person throws out the same exact number despite maybe 2 months going by. Then fast-forward again, I have completed my internship, I reach out to ask about employment numbers and get the exact same number. There are no specifics, no real data, no concrete evidence ever presented. Just a random statistic that never changes. So in about a 4-5 month span, the success rate has stayed exactly the same? Yea I don't buy it and neither should you.    3. Cohort Group  There is no pre-screening or assessment done before you do this program. Looking back, that should have been a huge red flag that LEARN just wants your money. People in my cohort ranged from being geniuses and having comp-sci backgrounds to people who could barely type. As someone who was middle of the road and understood the concepts after putting in extra work, it was difficult to learn because LEARN operates using paired-programming. Some days I would get steamrolled by the students who already had tech backgrounds and they just wanted to finish the assignment. Other days it was like pulling teeth trying to explain a topic to a student who didn't know the difference between JavaScript and Ruby.  Overall, it was difficult to learn topics consistently and would require HOURS of extra work outside of class to try and understand it. (Also in part because the instructors couldn't/wouldn't help us --> it was part of the learning process )   4. Outdated Technology LEARN would always try and flex and say things like "We are constantly evolving and teaching things that meet the demand of the marketplace" in regards to their curriculum. However, they have been teaching the same React/Ruby on Rails curriculum for the last 2 years at least. Newbies reading this should know that Ruby and Ruby on Rails is not big anymore and definitely not big in San Diego, Orange County, or LA (where I am assuming most people attending this program would be from). Rails is popular in San Francisco and New York and even then, you find other programming back-end languages like Java, Python, and Go WAY more in job postings than Ruby on Rails. Is Ruby/RoR a good skill to have? Sure. It's easy to learn but when you’re applying for that Junior position that requires Java or Python, they're not going to choose you. Also, half-way through the program, the instructors decided to stop checking in on student progress. Students had lots of questions and nothing every got answered and we just moved on, wasting about 2 weeks’ worth of projects that got no real answer. Overall, if you're paying this much money for a boot camp, you should be learning the latest and greatest not something that was popular 10 years ago.    5. Professional Development Week You have a whole week break during the cohort where you update your professional appearance on LinkedIn and build a portfolio. You get lecture after lecture on topics ranging on elevator pitches, updating your resume, and updating your LinkedIn. If you want to save yourself the time and energy doing this, just find a portfolio on YouTube and spruce it up and make it your own. Go on LEARN Academy on linked in and just search any alumni (literally any of them that have it) and you can see the paragraph that every single alum has in relation to what they did at LEARN. Also, you get a professional headshot done for all your professional online presence. The Elevator Pitch is just a YouTube video, the portfolio template they give you, and again, you're going to have the exact same blurb as anyone who has ever attended LEARN on your LinkedIn. At the end of the week, you send your resume to Bryan who is the career coach person for feedback. The feedback is honestly not even remotely useful because after independently testing that resume against job postings and resume critics from real developers, my resume would have been instantly scrapped and ghosted.    Conclusion: Would I do LEARN Academy again? Absolutely not. There's mediocre student support wrapped in "we are a family" mentality which means their niceness covers up the fact that they are in fact, pretty useless.  From teaching yourself, working against other cohort students to try and figure out issues when pair programming, and doing the bare minimum when it comes to updating your social presence, it’s obvious that LEARN is not in it to truly help students succeed and just want your money. Nobody, from the CEO down to the instructors, really has a solid tech/developer background and it shows. I would highly encourage you to consider doing another program that is actually student-focused, has actual instructors that have experience in the industry, and a large reliable network. You are paying 14-20k for this and it should be worth that. But in reality, you are paying 14-20k for a 1-month internship with a local tech company which really makes no sense. 
 

I joined LEARN in 2019 to pursue a career as a web developer and was told by them that 85% of their graduates have jobs within six months. I have since found out about 8 months after graduating that, that number is completely made up and it is much harder to get a job then advertised. They make it seem as if it is so easy to break into the tech industry. In reality, you need much more experince then they can offer. They also preach that you don't need prior experience, but that is also a lie. They do give you a good environment to be around and help you start to understand what you are doing, but this is not worth 15k. I strongly advise someone who is looking to joing a coding bootcamp to find one that actually invests in you finding a job. The staff at LEARN are very nice, but I would be too if you paid me 15k to hang out for three months. I'm not saying not to join, but don't expect to get hired afterwards. 

Learn Academy is a fast-paced program for getting practical experience with many different relevant technologies in a short amount of time. The immersive portion happens quickly,  students are exposed to Git, data structures, and we were pair programming daily through the day's projects. The curriculum is structured for layering in new technologies, and before you know it, you're familiar with relational databases and doing a deep dive into the inner workings of Rails.

The instructors are fantastic. The student to teacher ratio is very favorable for student-teacher interactions, and they were consistently pivotal in getting me on track with the material on pace to get through the assessments. There is a lot of information, so be 100% prepared to have no life while you're working through the curriculum. I thought 100 hours a week would be an exaggeration, but I was consistently logging 95-100 hours each week studying the material straight through the weekend.

The past four months have been a grueling yet highly rewarding experience. You get out of it what you put into it, and you have to put a lot into it if you want to get through the totality of the curriculum, but at the end, you will have the skills and confidence necessary to land your first position as a developer.

If you're a hopeful web developer or engineer in San Diego, Learn is the only bootcamp I recommend. A couple primary reasons: 1. internship and career services 2. program's willingness to change.

The internship experience speaks for itself. To have the opportunity to apply classroom skills to a functioning business is so important. One of the biggest barriers to finding employment is job experience; the internship does help address that deficit. Learn's career services is also a real strength. A week of the program will be devoted to preparing you for a job search, from the obvious things like creating a new resume to the less obvious, like taking LinkedIn head shots. I do not know how else I would've pulled everything together and very much appreciated Bryan's guidance. 

I also mention the program's willingness to accept feedback as a highlight - and it absolutely is. Prior to attending Learn, I worked at a university managing a program and have real understanding of how difficult it can be to modify classroom focus or process. Learn does a really impressive job of soliciting and responding to feedback. Every cohort changes - new projects, new format, emphasis on new skills - which is incredibly difficult to do. It does help them stand out; each cohort gets better.  

As a final note, I do think it's important to stress that you will not get everything out of Learn if you do not put in the work. Most career switches take about 18 months. Learn's program, including internship, is 4 months. I do believe that in order to be most successful, you have to put in extra time outside of Learn's allotted 40 hours/week. It is an intense program and requires focus for success. Know that the job market is tough for junior developers or engineers, but if you do the work, it pays off. I encourage you to control your fate as much as possible. Take advantage of learn alum, meetups, their recommended prep work, pairing programming, access to teachers and each of their unique strengths.

Learn is great. They will work hard on your behalf. Full recommendation from me.

My time at LEARN Academy was one of the best experiences of my life honestly. I came into it expecting to be good. But it ended up being great! I knew it would be challenging, which it was. I knew it would be hard at times, and it was. And I knew it would be a lot to take in, in such a small amount of time, and it was.

LEARN Academy and their instructors teach the content in way that makes it stick in your head. It is fast paced but as long as you are willing to put in the hard work and proper effort, you will pick it up very quickly.

Additionally, LEARN has you develop applications to practice the content which really brings everything together. Working with other students in the cohort is one of the best ways to learn because you're all learning the same content, at the same time.

One of the best things about LEARN is their career services. You are taken on a startup crawl in downtown San Diego so that you really get to see what tech companies are really like. After that, they help you practice technical interviews, real interviews, and prep you for your internship at the end of the cohort.

Overall, LEARN Academy is the perfect bootcamp if you're looking to become a software developer. I came into it having went to another bootcamp a few years back and there really was no comparison. LEARN is a hundred times better than the bootcamp I went to before. I recommend LEARN Academy to anyone interested in getting into the industry!

After completing 10 years of military service, I decided to take the plunge and transition into the civilian workforce. I knew that I wanted to go into tech and had always enjoyed dabbling in coding. I also knew that I did not want to invest the time or money to attend a 4-year college to get a computer science degree when I already have a bachelor's. 

I decided to investigate bootcamps. I looked at Origin, HackReactor's online program, UCSD and LEARN Academy. All four were comparably priced and offered some sort of veteran discount. LEARN offered a weekend Jumpstart program as a initial trial. It offered the chance to preview the class style without the daunting pricetag. After attending, I was sold.

The course is based around pair programming. While it may not be everyone's style (quite honestly it isn't mine), it's a great environment for learning. If you're stuggling through a section, your peers can help explain as you work through a problem. If you understand how to solve a problem, you can teach your peers and further cement your understanding of the topic. There is a reason why the instructors stick to the format. It works. 

Another thing that the instructors will stress is learning how to solve problems on your own. They will try to lead you to where you can find answers but try to put the onus on the student to actually solve it. This style can be understandably frustrating for some people initially but it is hands down the best way to become accustomed to the reality of engineering. In this job you will constantly be faced with new concepts and no instructor. Becoming a pro at understanding documentation and tracking errors through your code is an essential software engineering skill. 

As to the price tag... you have to think about what you are paying for. Can you learn everything on your own online through practice and tutorials? Absolutely. Could I have gotten to where I am today by doing that? Definitely not. I needed the focus, immersion, and guidance provided by LEARN. I needed a place to go every day which pushed my learning pace forward. I needed peers and instructors who held me accountable for the effort I needed to put in. I also needed the internship to solidify what life looked like as a developer. 

I would highly recommend LEARN to anyone wanting to pursue a software engineering career. I would also encourage everyone to do their due diligence to learn what that career is really like. Go to Jumpstart. Do some tutorials online beforehand. Make the commitment to put in the effort. I got hired by my internship company and work on some really cool stuff now as an engineer. I love my job and I have LEARN to thank for making it possible.

LEARN Academy was one of the best experiences I've had in my life! I absolutely loved being there each day working with the staff and learning with my classmates. It is, of course, not for the faint of heart. Transitioning to a completely new career isn't an easy thing to do and learning how to be a web developer in 3 months is a daily grind. But it is rewarding, exhilarating and worth it. The best part about it is that the LEARN staff are there for you each step of the way, supporting and guiding you.

I cannot stress enough how supportive, encouraging and thoughtful the staff are. Each of them worked with us on things on areas that we needed to develop and they even tailored the curriculum to fit our needs and the things we were interested in. Even though I was enrolled during a time where there was a transition for the Career Services Manager, we didn't feel like we were dropped through the cracks or that we received any less attention than other cohorts previously. And we are still receiving job support and mentorship, even though I've already graduated. 

I come from a kinesiology background and needed a change. I had my fitness business online but I decided to take the technology portion of it more seriously. I did not want to go back to college to start all over so I decided, after lots of research, I wanted to go to an immersive coding bootcamp to jump into a new career. 

Before attending Learn, I saw that they have a weekend course called Jumpstart. I attended and got a really good sense of the course work and how the class would be set up. After Jumpstart, I decided it was going to be a good fit to attend Learn Academy and the bonus is that the money spent on JumpStart goes towards your tuition.

The course is hard by taking a lot of brain power while also staying optimistic/humble. At Learn I felt like I had my classmates and my teachers to help me when I got stuck. Now, after having a professional job as a developer, all the soft skills you need for pair programming and learning in a semi-stressful environment is necessary! I work remotely and I constantly need to know how to work well with others and learn new things with other developers. The team at Learn strives to set you up for success and I am very happy I decided to attend Learn Academy!