My friend and ex-Titanite Dan Garland has recently started up a new project in London. We Got Coders is a training organisation for agile web developers focussed on Ruby on Rails.
The different (and interesting) part is that, after the first 3 months of class-room training, they send their students out to real companies as freelance developers, paired with a senior developer.
The students get real world experience and the company gets first refusal on whether to make a job offer on the student once they graduate from the programme, having already had experience with them on real projects (albeit under guidance).
The catch for the students is that they pay for their training themselves, and they’ll only be admitted to the programme after being vetted (they’re expected to have some amount of interest in programming or a bit of experience before beginning).
I think it’s a really fantastic idea and I’ll be closely watching to see how it goes.
Dan even used my email signature in one of his classes the other day. (I was very proud.)
