President Obama declared last week National Apprenticeship Week, a full week celebrating how apprenticeships foster innovation and prosperity.

Apprenticeships are a core component of the Zip Code Wilmington bootcamp. Through the Zip Code apprenticeship, we create opportunities for individuals to enter the software engineering field without previous professional experience while changing the way that employers find quality talent.

Our employment partners are taking notice. Last Thursday, guests from across Delaware converged on Zip Code for a night showcasing our students and their work. Everyone in attendance was blown away by our students’ level of dedication, technical proficiency, and achievement.

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As their technology needs increase, employers are encountering more difficulty filling open software engineering jobs. Motivated individuals are taking notice and working hard to learn how to code, hoping to challenge themselves, increase their earning potential and create a career building software.

Unfortunately, employers and job-seekers encounter barriers to connecting with one-another. Job-seekers new to programming, whether comp-sci graduates, self-taught coders or bootcamp alumni, are stalled when employers require previous professional experience. Meanwhile, employers are facing critical needs and require skilled employers who are well versed in the languages, tools and frameworks that their organization is using today.

Zip Code Wilmington bridges the gap between motivated individuals and top employers through a strategic 6-month apprenticeships following our 12-week Java bootcamp. We work directly with employment partners to understand their most pressing software development needs and teach our students the appropriate skills to meet those needs.

While many of our students don’t have previous professional experience, their education goes beyond theory to real-world applications. Through real software projects, students become familiar with how to use the tools our partners work with to create solutions for today’s challenges.

We can’t provide our employers with candidates who all have professional experience, but we can be sure that our candidates have what they need to succeed without it.

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Interested in an apprenticeship that prepares you for a career in software engineering? Apply now for our next 12-week Java bootcamp.

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