Amid dull job market, tech graduates enlist in boot camps to boost skills

The demand for boot camps in firms like Upgrad, Coding Ninjas, Scaler, Great Learning, and Newton School has risen by 2-3 times in the last 6-12 months

As a slow job market and rapid changes in tech job profiles are forcing young graduates to upgrade themselves, the demand for "boot camps" — quick and extensive skilling programmes — has grown at a brisk rate, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET).

For many young graduates wanting to build skills in tech areas such as cybersecurity, generative AI, DevOps, data science, machine learning, cloud, coding, data science and full-stack, boot camps, a term borrowed from military terminology, have become essential to bolster their chances of getting employed.

The demand for boot camps in firms like Upgrad, Coding Ninjas, Scaler, Great Learning, and Newton School has risen by two to three times in the last six to 12 months. To boost their skills, students from engineering colleges such as Vellore Institute of Technology and National Institutes of Technology, as well as several other colleges, are joining in droves.

Hari Krishnan Nair, the co-founder of Great Learning, was quoted as saying that as the job market gets tighter, the premium on skills is increasing even more. Companies have changed their approach when it comes to hiring freshers. Now they seek readily deployable talent, he added.

Apart from the freshers, early career professionals with one to three years of experience seek to join boot camps to upgrade their skills.

Mayank Kumar, co-founder of Upgrad, said his company is recording two-and-a-half times growth year-on-year.

Usually, boot camp courses are conducted in short and concise four to six months modules. Some courses run up to 12 months. About 75 to 80 per cent of the students are from engineering backgrounds, whereas others are from science or maths streams. Depending on the placement assistance and course content, the course fee for many such courses could vary between Rs 50,000 and Rs 5 lakh.

Abhimanyu Saxena, the co-founder of Scaler and InterviewBit, said the demand for such boot camps is mostly from working professionals who are trying to transition to better jobs. The company starts a new cohort every month. With about 2,000 learners in each cohort, the company currently has 16 to 20 active cohorts.

Siddharth Maheshwari, co-founder of Newton School, stated that many are attempting to upskill specifically in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) jobs.