Madrid When a friend told him about her intensive course in programming, Carlos Mingorance waved him off. “It seemed too good to be true: you take classes for a few weeks and then immediately find a well-paying IT job,” he says.
But the conversation wouldn’t let him go – and in the end he also enrolled in a boot camp in Madrid for training as a full-stack developer. “A week after the course ended, I had a job, not in Madrid but even in my hometown of Granada. I never would have thought of that,” he says. The 30-year-old has been working there for the Telekom subsidiary T-Systems for four months.
For the trained chef, this is a 180-degree turnaround: before that, he worked in the hospitality industry in Ireland for several years and as a tourist guide in his native Granada. “But I wanted to get out of there – these jobs are badly paid and still rob a lot of quality of life,” says Mingorance. “I’ve never been able to go out for drinks with my friends at night or see them on holidays.”
The pandemic has boosted the boot camp boom
Many Spaniards have done the same. “Boot camps, i.e. practically training camps, have been around for ten years. But in the past three years, they have experienced a boom, mainly due to the pandemic,” says Philip Moscoso, Professor of Technology Management at the IESE Business School.
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In an average of twelve weeks, such boot camps teach the candidates basic knowledge of programming – and advertise with employment rates of their graduates of 80 to 90 percent. Some companies finance the entire course for the students and give a job guarantee in advance.
Their need is huge: According to the Spanish employers’ association of IT companies, DigitalEs, there were 124,000 vacancies in Spain in March in the field of information and communication technology (ICT). “This is a strong increase since June 2021, when we assumed 70,000 unfilled positions,” says DigitalES. In addition, seven out of ten IT jobs remained vacant for a long time.
And that in a country where 14 percent of the population is unemployed – the second highest figure in the EU after Greece.
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Candidates are not only attracted by the prospect of a job, but also by a comparatively high salary: According to Ironhack, one of the leading boot camp providers in Europe, Spanish coding school graduates earn between 22,000 and 27,000 euros a year in their first job.
This means that those starting their careers come close to the average annual income in Spain, which was just under 27,000 euros in 2021.
“After six months on the job, the salary has already increased by 30 to 40 percent,” explains Valentín Cortés Puya, Ironhack’s campus manager in Madrid’s Matadero district, a former slaughterhouse site that is now a cultural center. Many companies are hiring young professionals in their need, but they are much more urgently looking for candidates with experience.
According to the data collector Course Report, which specializes in coding boot camps, in 2020 in the USA and Canada 79 percent of boot camp graduates found a job in the IT industry and their salary increased by an average of 56 percent.
Study: Graduates’ salaries increase by an average of 56 percent
The number of boot camp providers worldwide is growing accordingly. There are currently 35 coding camps in Spain – 86 percent more than five years ago. Ironhack alone trained 1,200 graduates in Spain last year, three times as many as five years earlier. Candidates can be trained at the company founded in Spain in four areas: data analysts, UX and UI designers of websites, experts in cybersecurity or full-stack web developers writing apps.
The idea of the fast training is to equip the graduates with just the coding knowledge that companies need at the moment. A computer science course at a Spanish university lasts four years.
“But IT is evolving so fast that knowledge is already out of date by the time students graduate from computer science,” says Ironhack campus manager Cortés Puya.
Ricardo Carreras knows the plight of the corporations well. “Companies are currently only able to tackle technology projects to a limited extent because they lack the appropriate specialist staff,” says the entrepreneur, whose portfolio includes personnel consultancy Selecta Digital, which specializes in technology jobs, and Business -School ID Digital and since 2021 also ID Bootcamp.
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Carreras founded the latter in the middle of the pandemic to meet the increasing need for software experts and data analysts. “2022 will be the year of the talent crisis in the information and communication industry,” he predicts. “Salaries will continue to rise because companies are not finding the talent they are looking for.”
His HR consultancy clients also include a company from Sweden and one from Estonia. They have extended their search for IT staff to Spain because they cannot find any candidates at home.
“Jobs in IT in particular can also be done from other locations, which is why an international search is promising – also for German companies,” says Carreras. Salaries in Spain are significantly lower, and more and more candidates are speaking fluent English.
“Someone kept crying in class”
The lessons in a boot camp largely follow the motto “learning by doing”: After a basic introduction, future coders are given tasks and solve them either with instructions in class or afterwards at home.
Many Spaniards are still looking for a job or the right job.
(Photo: dpa)
“It’s like learning a new language,” says Cortés Puya. “It only works if you do it all the time.” Ironhack is therefore very selective among the applicants.
Cortés Puya is convinced that “if you only take the course to earn a lot of money quickly, you won’t be happy with it”. 15 percent of those interested reject Ironhack – mainly because they are either not motivated enough or because they lack basic computer skills. But anyone who can create a folder or save files on the PC already has the necessary technical knowledge for a boot camp.
Then it’s time for work – and the days are long. “I had no life left,” says Lisa Medina, sliding deep into the plastic chair behind the plywood grandstand in Ironhack’s lobby.
The 26-year-old trained psychologist has started training as a full-stack web developer. “After two weeks we were all so exhausted that someone kept crying in class,” she says.
Classes in Madrid’s Matadero neighborhood run from 9am to 6pm, but at 10:30pm many are still sitting in front of their laptops. “There’s a lot of suffering here,” says campus manager Cortés Puya.
The Spanish bank Santander is financing the candidates’ boot camp
The coding boot camp lives up to its name: the expression comes from the military and refers to a camp for beginners who complete their basic training with the appropriate drill.
Nonetheless, Medina is satisfied with her education. “It’s a great feeling when you’ve completed a task. I never go to bed before I’ve done this.”
She put down a deposit for the nine-week course, which costs $10,000 at Ironhack, and will pay off the rest when she gets a job. Numerous boot camps offer this form of financing.
If you don’t have the money or want to be on the safe side with your job, you can take one of the classes that companies fully finance and for which they give you a guarantee of employment.
At Ironhack, for example, the major Spanish bank Santander and its online subsidiary Openbank do this. “The bank wants this course to focus more on the Java programming language than other courses,” says Cortés Puya. “In the last course, Santander only wanted women.”
Even if not all boot camps have their employment rates certified by auditors like Ironhack, the balance is positive according to various studies. “Programming is a very practice-oriented activity,” judges expert Moscoso. “Unlike a management degree, for example, you can teach them in just a few weeks.”
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