Northcoders - Manchester

Adam Willis

Northcoders is a very supportive organisation, with passionate teachers. I have gained so much from them in droves even after the course. I wish they turned over less students because finding a junior role is hard but overall I had a very positive experience.

Yana

It has been an incredible experience for me. ☺️ The supportive mentors and focus on real-world projects helped me build my confidence as a developer. The collaborative environment and focus on pair programming and TDD really sharpened my problem-solving skills. I highly recommend Northcoders to anyone looking to transition into tech or level up their coding skills. ?

Catherine Pulman

A great experience from start to finish: really enthusiastic tutors and mentors, loads of one-to-one help if you want it, a very well-structured and organised course, and an impressive amount of content covered in the time available. It does move at a fast pace, but most of the time you are putting what you've learnt that day into practice, so it's not too overwhelming. Be aware that there aren't a huge number of opportunities being advertised through the jobsboard, and it feels like a generally competitive time for finding entry-level jobs in this area, so you will want to be searching for jobs externally too and ready to accept it might take a little while to land that first role. Overall a great experience though and definitely made me excited to pursue a career in software development. Thanks very much Northcoders!

Zac Harvey

I highly recommend Northcoders if you're thinking of making the jump to software development. It was a great experience. The material was top notch, the structure of the course seemed just right and the support was great. It really gave me a strong foundation in-full stack development but more importantly, made me feel confident in applying for junior dev roles. I was able to secure a role just 2 months after completing the bootcamp.

Serp

NC is nothing special sadly, it's the same as all intensive boot camps whereby when you scratch away the shiny veneer it's just a conveyor belt throwing out people with wildly inconsistent abilities.

There's a lot of self learning with NC & they focus on test driven, pair programming which means your experience can be greatly affected by who you're with.
There's only one speed, with inconsistent difficulty & set tasks that some will complete & others won't.
If you fall behind, there's no additional help, just false platitudes to drag you to the end of the course.

The quality of the course is also hit & miss as they try to fit too much in so the fundamentals & backend sections were very well done but the frontend section was sorely lacking & felt very rushed.

The reason for such a low score is that I was rather rudely spoken to by a team member (angrily belittled) & made to redo a section that put me behind; it upset me but I wouldn't be beaten as I saw this as the launchpad to a new career.
I spent weekends/evenings catching back up only to get a bug that I couldn't fix or understand and when I tried to get help all I got is "sorry we've moved on from that" from multiple staff on multiple occasions; this despite it being a key part of the course that had to be completed to get post-course support & access to their job board etc.

From that moment I stopped believing the lie they parrot of "trust the process" and realised it's just to keep you rolling along without thinking too much until it's too late. I realised that for all the banter, none of the staff genuinely cared about students enough to spend a few minutes getting me back on track.

The experience left me deflated & made it very hard to get motivated to code for a long time after the course; something I'd loved doing daily for months before starting.

I wasn't going to leave a review but it's been well over a year & I still think about it every time I code.
No doubt there's a lot of similar experiences out there but former students generally keep quiet because they don't want to feel they wasted a lot of time, effort &/or money nor do they want to reduce the perceived value of having Northcoders on their CV.

shengshi zhan

Truly amazing experience, I used to be a tax consultant and now a software engineer. Northcoders can help you with anything you need as long as you are determined and work hard.

Liam Abc

Did the 13 week software development boot camp. The boot camp taught me lots of fundamental skills in JavaScript which led me to being able to build simple full stack applications. The course covered fundamentals, frontend, backend as well as a full stack project. I also managed to land a job as a full stack developer shortly after attending this course.

The fellow students on the course were really great to work with. We pair programmed often which helped us solidify out understanding. We also kept in touch after the course finished. The mentors and seminar leads were also very helpful.

The office is situated pretty well on Oxford road.

One of the biggest draw backs of the course is the company are acting as if it was still covid. All the lectures and seminars were online and many times NC staff were no where to be seen. Although there was plenty of people in the office to have in person seminars and help.

Also, found it frustrating that the careers team were so picky with CV's. They force you to write a CV to their exact standards and felt like their standards are not what an employer is looking for. So essentially I had a fake CV to appease the careers team and a real CV that I would use to apply for jobs. The jobs board is also pretty bare and I found my job externally.

Gareth Everson

Northcoders is - without any doubt at all in my mind - the best professional education I've ever done in my career. I was a little nervous coming into the programme in my 40's because I thought it would be full of teens and twenty-somethings and I'd be out of my depth and comfort zone. That fear couldn't have been further from the truth. From day one, hour one it was absolutely clear how inclusive and diverse the cohort and trainers were. My biggest regret having completed the training is not discovering Northcoders earlier.

The structure of the course can feel a little strange at first, layering new learning on top of what you've learned the day before. At the time, I found parts of the first couple of weeks frustrating and I beat myself up a bit on the progress I might have been making. But when you look back later in the course, you realise you actually understand way more than you did at the time. The key thing to remember is this: it's a model that works tremendously well and has done for thousands of graduates. Trust the process. Trust the knowledge layering. Trust the practice katas and the pair programming opportunities. The mentor support is first class and very empathetic. It's a huge help and reassurance that so many of the mentors have come through the bootcamp themselves, so they totally understand the learner's perspective every day, every week and can relate their experiences at that point to yours. The value of this is huge.

I cannot recommend this programme highly enough to anybody considering a shift (big or small) to a career in software development. The return on 3 months time investment will last a lifetime.