Northcoders, one of the UK’s leading tech training providers, has announced details of its new part time Academy for Businesses.
It has been created to help businesses, including those in Northern Ireland, wanting to onboard new developers directly into their teams or upskill existing employees in just 20 weeks. The course is an extension of its In-House Academies offering which has been adopted by KPMG and NHS Digital.
The core aim of the Part-Time Academy is to deliver adaptable developers who have a deep understanding of programming and the ability to quickly adapt to any company’s tech stack and codebase. Cutting-edge skills will be taught while allowing employees to remain fully integrated into a business creating value sooner. It will be delivered remotely, and flexibly, so people can learn from the office or home – giving firms full visibility into their progress. This means there will be no need for long-term absences or disruptions to day-to-day operations, whilst costly downtimes during critical periods can also be avoided.
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It is fully customised to fit the individual needs of a business, ensuring both new and existing employees can seamlessly apply their learning directly to specific workflows and tools. This is achieved by balancing technical training with business practices, meaning every person’s development aligns with their employer’s goals and team dynamics.
Companies which use the Part-Time Academy to upskill employees rather than hiring externally will save on recruitment, onboarding and training costs. And unlike the full-time bootcamp, businesses will not have to cover workloads or hire temporary staff as the trainee doesn’t leave the business.
Covering both front-end and back-end development, with a particular focus on web application development, the Part-Time Academy offers a flexible learning schedule that allows businesses to onboard new team members while they train and support existing employees throughout the process.
The course includes three and half hours of taught content per week which is broken down into two hours of lectures, one hour of seminars and 30 minutes of one-to-one mentoring. Students also have access to additional study groups and drop-in sessions.
In the Core Skills Block (Weeks 1-2), topics covered are: distributed version control; visualising function executions; breaking down a problem; interpreting documentation; and debugging.
In the JavaScript Fundamentals Block (Weeks 3-10), topics covered are: test-driven development - unit testing; pair programming; variable scope; higher order functions; closure; data structure design; classes; handling asynchronous processes; and making requests across the internet.
In the Back-End Block (Weeks 11-15), topics covered are: RESTful servers; CRUD operations; Express.js framework; MVC architecture; SQL; database seeding; test-driven development/ integration testing; error handling; and CICD.
And finally, in the Front-End block (Weeks 16-20), topics covered are: semantic HTML; responsive CSS; DOM manipulation; React; building interfaces with components; interacting with third part APIs; and single page application routing.
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"Businesses who put their staff on our part-time course will see them delivering value from day one, as the skills they learn are immediately applicable to real-world projects and aligned with their company's practices." said David Bartlett, Head of the Part-Time Bootcamp team at Northcoders.
He added: “The demand for tech talent continues to grow, and we are here to help businesses scale their teams quickly and affordably. The Part-Time Academy delivers the same award-winning, industry-recognised skills as our full-time bootcamp. This ensures partner companies can trust that their employees will confidently contribute to their teams throughout the programme and beyond."
Since it was established in 2016, 95% of Northcoders’ 4,000 graduates are now working as software developers at more than 450 businesses across the UK. The average time it takes for a Northcoders graduate to find work is just 40 days.
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