From first line of code to employed: a public development bootcamp cohort

The challenge

Regional employers repeatedly reported that entry-level candidates held certificates but could not work in a real codebase: no version control discipline, no testing habit, no deployment experience and no ability to read someone else's code. The gap was practical exposure, not theory.

What we did

We worked through this in stages, starting with what had to be true before anything else could be built.

1. Structured the track around four shipped projects of increasing complexity rather than a topic checklist.
2. Taught Git workflow, code review and CI/CD from week one, so collaboration habits formed before the code got hard.
3. Paired every participant with a mentor from the delivery team for weekly code review.
4. Finished with a mentored capstone deployed to a live environment and presented to invited employers.

The result

Measured against the baseline captured during discovery, not against a target chosen afterwards.

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