Makers Academy

Makers is a great option for those wanting to transition into tech. The 12 week course is fast paced but comprehensive and designed not only to teach you how to code, but how to learn in general.
The hands-off teaching style from the coaches encourages you to be more independent and find answers on your own or reach out for help within your cohort. The careers team are excellent and provide as much support as you require with things like interview prep, improving your CV and even one to one coaching. Overall the Makers staff are super positive and always willing to help.
I highly recommend Makers to anyone willing to put the hard work in, it's totally worth it!

Makers provides a great learning environment for a wide variety of people with the willingness to learn. The ways that they do this are through skills workshops, independent learning time and pairing time. One of the most important aspects being pairing which is an opportunity to sit down and code on a task together with someone else which provides you with a different perspective to coding independently. 
The opportunity to work in teams and practice agile methodologies is invaluable as this is what many companies are currently using or moving towards. The coaches are very helpful and open to questions which makes the workshops fun and useful. The culture is one which also aims to promote mental health awareness through daily meditation and regular yoga sessions.
Some problems were with job hunting. Due to the unfortunate circumstances there was quite a lot of reduced support including the removal of the careers fairs. It also didn't help that they added pressure towards job hunters by tightening rulings in the job offer guarantee.
Overall, there were some struggles on the job-hunting side of things due to the unfortunate circumstances of COVID-19 but I really enjoyed the course and it has provided me with invaluable experiences. 

Pros:
- Meet lots of great people. 
- Amazing to see what you can learn in a relatively short space of time.
- Freedom to work on your own project in a group at the end of the course. 
- Compared to other bootcamps, you get a good full stack approach. 
- TDD approach is drilled into you from day one, which stands you in good stead for interviews. Process reviews with external reviewers are another great way to prep you for interviews. 

Cons:
- Coaches are stretched and as a result,  aren't able to offer as much support as most people would like.
- My cohort was let down by the careers fair - only one company turned up to the first fair; 3 to the second a month later, with one of these companies retracting their job openings a few days later. Therefore, there were only 4 job openings for around 2 cohorts worth of people. You need to be motivated and dedicated to finding yourself a job outside of the course. 
- Some of the course material needs updating or for coaches to check for errors before using the material. 

Truly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I joined Makers this year after dropping out of a humanities degree at university - without any prior computer science knowledge, industry experience or coding skills to speak of.

 

Since then Makers has enabled me to land my dream job as a Software Engineer, at a company I’m super excited to work for! The course itself is fantastic and extremely apt in teaching practices which are highly valued the industry. Not only this, but the people & culture are extremely giving, and I had a lot of fun in the process. I’m really grateful for entire Makers experience; from writing the first lines of code to securing a job - I was amazed by it all from start to finish!

I really enjoyed the focus on mental well-being along with learning new skills and the curriculum. Although there was heavy focus on learning ruby in the precourse by no means was it the only language learnt. It help set the pace and knowledge for how to learn new languages. 

During my time at Makers I had the chance to learn Ruby, Javascript, Python and Swift. When it comes to the final project, it is very flexible and the team do their best to make sure you get support throughout. 

In terms of the careers team they were super helpful. I got a job with one of the hiring partners and beforehand they were great at giving me advice on unsuccessful applications and how to prep for the final interview. 

This is definitely an experience I would recommend anyone looking to change their career at any stage in their lives. 

Makers provided an excellent bootcamp, that enabled developers like myself (with no coding experience)  to be able to go off and make valuable contributions to their tech company. The curriculum  provided, covered a wide range of topics that allowed  you to be exposed to a range of best practices ,key development concepts and  programming languages.  The support given by the coaches are of a high quality and they are  very supportive and patient. Not only are you supported on a technical level but also on an emotional level by the Student Support Coach.
Cohorts need to be more diverse and inclusive however, and include more females  and more people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Makers has been an incredible experience overall and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone considering it. I came to coding with little knowledge or experience but with their guidance and support I have been able to land an incredible job as a junior software developer within 6 weeks of completing the course! It is expensive and for most people will involve some risk but I would say it is definitely worth it. 

There is a lovely supportive atmosphere at Makers and I met some amazing people there. Everyone is lovely, kind, motivated and driven and it's an inspiring place to be :) It is very intense though and you have to be ready to dedicate the majority of your time to learning during the three months. You have to be ok with doing a lot of the work yourself but I found that there is lots of explanation and help if you need it. 

Lastly, one of the best parts of makers is the careers team. They offer incredible support after the course and have some amazing contacts within the tech world. Jobhunting isn't easy and again it's up to you to put the time and effort in, but if you do, there are lots of opportunities out there. 

If you're thinking about doing it, I would say go for it! With their help, I have changed career completely within the space of 6 months and you can too :)

The MA Remote course is good for having a general introduction to web development practices and technologies involved (mainly Ruby). The course is based on TDD, agile and pair-programming. Although they say anybody can be a programmer in 12 weeks, I would recommend this course to people with a technical background or already familiar with programming, otherwise, instead of acquire the skills to be ready for the job market, the time would be spent on learning the fundamentals, which being honest, is not enough for assure a job in the end.

The good stuff about the course is that the topics are mostly up to date with the requirements of the market. The languages, practices and workflow is quite similar to what I encountered on the job that I found. On the other handm I expected more experienced tutors and definitely more support on the job hunting process at completion of the course.