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Free Coding Bootcamps And Certifications: A Black American Guide To Engineering And $100K Salaries

Free Coding Bootcamps And Certifications: A Black American Guide To Engineering And $100K Salaries

engineering

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

The tech world is still painfully white and male. This is especially true for the field of software engineering, where 78 percent of software engineers are men. And 52.3 percent are white. Some 33 percent are Asian.

Black employees made up only 5.1 percent of the U.S. science and engineering workforce in 2019, according to the National Center for Science Engineering Statistics.

It is a profitable career as the salary range for an entry-level computer engineer job is from $85,072 to $127,900 per year in the U.S., according to Salary.com.

There are Black engineers, but there needs to be many more, says National Society of Black Engineers CEO Janeen Uzzell. NSBE is a group dedicated to improving recruitment and retention, and Uzzell is the former chief operating officer of the Wikimedia Foundation in Washington D.C. She worked for 16 years at General Electric.

“The common misconception is that we Black engineers don’t exist. But this is not true. The Black engineering undergraduate student enrollment grew from 29,070 in 2019 to 30,027 in 2020, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the American Society for Engineering Education,” Uzzell noted to Inc.

The problem, she said, is retention. The organization is working with schools and organizations to change that. The group, which was founded in 1975, not only wants to make sure Black people are trained in the field, but once they, get in Uzzell wants to make sure Black engineers find the workplace setting a place where they can grow.

“We are looking for ways to close the racial gaps by teaching from a more diverse standard. We want to let these Black engineering students be heard if they are at predominantly white institutions. We’d like to promote and elevate their experiences based on their feedback,” she noted.

There are a growing number of places to get free training in coding.

But before you sign up, do your research. Check out the teacher’s credentials, comments by former students, and what exactly the course offers and if you will receive certification, advises Career Foundry. You will also want to make sure the class is up to date as things change fast in the field.

There are free online coding bootcamps which allow you to receive professional-level training for various careers, such as software engineering, data science, data analytics, and web design, according to Career Karma, which can match you to the best course for you. NuCamp is one organization that offers free bootcamps.

Free bootcamps are intensive training programs that tend to six weeks to six months to complete.

On the other hand, free coding courses are individual, specialized programs designed to improve a particular skill, according to Career Karma.

If you don’t want to take a full course, you can take free coding classes, which are typically for those that want to build on their programming foundations or learn the basics.

Some of the free classes you can check out include” “

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-using-a-laptop-5198239/