April 2025 News Roundup

Table of Contents

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• Pell Grants for Short-Term Programs (Finally?)
• Tech Hiring in 2025
• College Alternatives & Apprenticeships IRL
• Coding Bootcamp Program Changes
• 4 New Coding Bootcamp Programs
• Favorite Pieces on the Blog

Happy Spring! Alternative pathways into well-paying careers like cybersecurity and software engineering continue gaining momentum with new apprenticeship initiatives from the federal government and large states like California. We’re covering how Pell grants for short-term training programs may finally become a reality, and what the expansion of AI has meant for coders. Plus, learn about the 5 new coding bootcamps that we added to the Course Report directory in April.

Curious about what happened in bootcamps in March? Check out last month’s episode to listen to all the biggest coding bootcamp news from March!

Pell Grants for Short-Term Programs (Finally?)

• Politico reports that the House Education and Workforce Committee Republicans released their budget plans for higher education reforms, which includes Pell grants for short-term workforce training programs.

• FE Week shared that the UK’s national skills bootcamp contracts will only extend to construction programs rather than technical skills training. 

Tech Hiring in 2025

• IT Brew spoke with staffing experts about the frustration around today’s tech hiring process, highlighting a HackerRank report that found that 74% of developers find it hard or very hard to get a job in tech today .

• Echoing those IT Brew sentiments, Business Insider covered the difficulty of landing a job as a junior developer, citing companies' unrealistic demands that devs be “perfect” rather than competent.

• Business Insider also dove deep into how AI and unrealistic expectations for junior developers are affecting hiring rates of Gen Z coders.

• When Anthropic declared that AI could write 90% of code within the next 6 months, VentureBeat covered how Salesforce sees this as the evolution of coders, not the extinction of them. 

• MarketWatch covers how the rise in AI usage is sparking a trend among employers of reskilling current employees rather than onboarding new tech hires. 

• Refresh Miami reported how South Florida employers want to hire folks with AI, project management, and data skills. They point to a recent partnership between Ziplines Education and Florida International University that is bringing digital skills training to the area.

• In order to close the cybersecurity skills gap, Infosecurity Magazine highlights the importance of hiring cybersecurity professionals from non-traditional paths. 

• In the UK, The Times shares how professionals in art jobs, such as working at auction houses, are making career pivots into tech for better pay and work-life balance.

College Alternatives & Apprenticeships IRL

• In an executive order signed on April 23rd, the White House declared a new goal to reach one-million new apprentices per year through expanded apprenticeships and improved connections with the education system.

• The 74 Million covered a report showing that recent high school graduates, especially male graduates, are more interested in on-the-job training (such as apprenticeships) than traditional degrees. 

• To lean into this, Palantir has launched a “Meritocracy Fellowship,” a paid internship for recent high school graduates with Ivy-League test scores that prepares them for AI jobs. 

• California now has a final version of its Master Plan for Career Education, which emphasizes skills-based hiring and nontraditional learning pathways to careers. 

• Makers Academy has partnered with the UK government to supply tech training to civil servants through the TechTrak Apprenticeship. The initiative kicked off with a hackathon attended by the Prime Minister.

Coding Bootcamp Program Changes

• Non-profit bootcamp Turing School announced that it is closing doors in June. 

• Justin Singh was appointed the executive vice president and general manager of Cengage Work, which includes Infosec Institute.

• Techademy has named Subramanyam Reddy, the founder of UpGrad KnowledgeHut, as its new CEO. 

• Lauren Feiner of The Verge reported that Prehired bootcamp (a tech sales bootcamp program that was ordered to shut down by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2023), is “relaunching its old pitch under a new name: FastTrack.” On Course Report, we have added FastTrack Careers to our directory to ensure that alumni have the opportunity to leave reviews of their experience.

4 New Coding Bootcamp Programs

• CodeOp announced its new tech residency program for women, trans, and nonbinary individuals breaking into tech.

• Northcoders launched a new Data Engineering, AI and Machine Learning Bootcamp.

• In Texas, Baylor University and McLennan Community College (MCC) announced they will offer General Assembly training programs in IT and Python programming.

• The University of Virginia and Commonwealth Cyber Initiative partnered with AWS Skills Center Arlington to offer a Cyber & AWS Cloud Essentials Bootcamp, which includes AWS certification preparation.

5 New Schools Added to Course Report

Fractal Tech

Hyperskill

NewTech Academy

Techademy

Charis Intelligence

Favorite Pieces on the Blog

Is an interview preparation course worth it? Jess spoke with Alok, a Senior Data Engineer at AWS, about the impact of his Interview Kickstart course. Check out our Q&A to hear how Alok went from struggling in interviews to signing the contract for a dream job after Interview Kickstart!

At the top of 2025, Lighthouse Labs was acquired by Uvaro — but what has that meant for Lighthouse Labs students? Liz sat down for an exclusive podcast interview with Jeremy Shaki, CEO of Lighthouse Labs, and Sheila Fung, Director of Member Programming at Uvaro, to learn how career services has been boosted by this partnership.