2015: Bootcamp Breakdown

This year we’ve launched a new brand for our winter educational workshops, “Winter of Tech”, which is an acknowledgement that the success of our Summer internship programme is due to the huge number of volunteer hours that go into up-skilling students throughout the winter!

Since March, our team of amazing volunteers have been delivering practical workshops on professional and technical topics to tertiary students in Auckland Central (at the University of Auckland and AUT campuses,) and around the Wellington region (at Victoria University’s Kelburn, Te Aro and Pipitea campuses, Yoobee School of Design, Whitireia in Porirua, CreativeHQ, and WelTec in Petone).

Here’s a breakdown of all the Bootcamps we’ve run so far this year:

We’ve repeated a few of the topics, so the total is 58 bootcamps, with 600 (unique) students attending! It’s worth noting that these are busy students with a full course-load, often juggling part time jobs and family commitments on top of their studies – and still making time to attend evening and lunchtime Winter of Tech bootcamps. Some have made it to 1 or 2 sessions, the average is 5, with some superstars attending more than 10 bootcamps each!

Here’s Josh & Tats from Xero introducing Unit Testing at Whitireia in Porirua

The real stars of this show are the volunteers from industry who deliver the sessions. So far we’ve clocked over 200 volunteer hours (not including prep time).  This is pure industry training, folks, we have passionate tech professionals giving up their spare time to teach the stuff they WISH they’d been taught at uni (and it’s the stuff that’s in high demand in NZ’s IT industry).

New subjects in the programme this year: Agile development, delivered by the team from Nomad8, and Business Analysis, delivered by RedVespa.  Other bootcamp presenters so far in 2015 have come from companies as diverse as Powershop, Xero, Trade Me, Solnet, Mozilla, Vend, ikeGPS, Kiwibank, Koordinates, PwC Optimal Experience, Dot Loves Data, CatalystIT, Eiara, Datacom, Zing Design, Cactuslab, Pushpay, JSA, Silverstripe, Abletech, Sophie Buergin and StarNow.

Hamish from Silverstripe kicking off the PHP bootcamp in Auckland

And the team behind the bootcamps? Wranglers Anna, Lauren, Alex C, Troy, Amanda, Catherine and Ruth! Industry advisors Zheng & Alex G also deserve a shout out – they’ve been leading & wrangling topics and presenters for us, for which we’re hugely grateful 🙂

The Design programme has been running in Wellington only (so far, we have plans for Auckland though!), it was led by Zheng Li, owner of Zing Design, she’s also involved in the Female Founders meetup group.

Alex and Zheng lead a team of volunteers who love the idea of giving back to the next generation – they are passionate about connecting students with the skills, experience and connections to industry that will kick start their careers.

The Code programme was led by Alex Gibson who is a programmer at Atomic.io by day, and also finds time to co-ordinate the NZ node.js meetup group.

While the technical bootcamps prove very popular with students, they are often surprised to hear that it is “soft” skills, such as communication and presentation skills that can be key to landing your first job in the ICT industry.  This Winter’s Soft Skills programme was led by John Clegg, the founder of Summer of Tech, who works at Xero.

John, Ming & Carl helping out with 1:1 CV feedback at our Wellington CV Clinic

That’s not all, folks!  

We’re taking a bit of a break for mid-year exams, but we have more exciting bootcamps, site visits and a hackfest planned for July/August/September.

If you’re a tertiary student looking to kick-start your tech career with a paid summer internship, sign up here!

If you’re an employer, keen to host an intern this summer, more info is here, and sign up is here!

If you’re a tech professional interested in giving back, running a bootcamp, mentoring, sharing tips & tricks to help students get a start in the NZ tech industry, we’d love to hear from you, contact us here.