Course Topic Survey Summer 2017
Hamburg Coding School started in March 2017 as an endeavour to offer courses on coding. It was important to us to know what the demands were, so we conducted extensive market research. We reached out to software developers and to people seeking courses on coding, asking them what technologies they wanted to learn, and approached big tech companies to understand their needs in terms of training and career development options. This is the outcome of our interaction.
In order to get our data, we are continuously surveying and asking people what they want to learn with this form. It is a simple Google Form that we sent to colleagues, friends, and shared in our social media communities.
Also, we have a section on our website where anyone can post a suggestion for course topics. It uses Formspree, a tool that you can use to set up simple forms and get the responses by email.
And third, we visited a couple of the local big tech companies and asked them what they see would be a field where their software developers needed some training.
We did this for 6 months–January to June 2017–and collected the course topic suggestions and some data regarding the format of the course and the level of experience. In total, we got 134 course topic suggestions, 98 of which were from individuals, and 36 from companies. We present the results here, but want you to understand that these are not a comprehensive representation of the market but merely samples of our local audience.
Course Topic Suggestions
Since course topic suggestions were submitted as free text, they were unstructured and needed to be categorized. We decided for the following broad categories and counted the suggestions in them:
Front-end Web technologies are clearly the leading topics. These are technologies for web development, for showing UI in the browser. They comprise JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, and other related technologies.
They are followed by Back-end technologies: server technologies for delivering data to the user and persisting it in databases. Examples are Ruby on Rails, Go, and Node.js.
General Topics are topics like learning how to code, or more advanced topics like functional programming or desing patterns.
For Python, Android and iOS it was easier to assign single course topics to one of these categories. Others were topics where we got too few suggestions for as to put them into a single category. Examples were CI, Linux Administration, SAP, UX, Agile Project Management and SEO.
Front-End Web Technologies
We got so many course topic suggestions for front-end web technologies that it is interesting to split it down and categorize it further.
Many of the suggested topics were JavaScript-related. In fact, 14 of them were JavaScript in general or the “modern JavaScript technology stack”. We gave React.js its own category due to its popularity. It is followed by CSS, HTML5, Angular.js and Wordpress.
The 14 other topics are different technologies that got only one suggestion each. They are mainly JavaScript-related and include Redux, Flux, RxJS, ES6 and Vue.js.
Back-End Technologies
For back-end technologies, we got a lot of different suggestions that also deserve a closer look.
Ruby, including Ruby on Rails, is the leading technology here that people want to learn. It is followed by Go and Node.js. Less popular, but still on the topic list, are SQL, Java and Rust. The “Others” category contains Apache Spark, Mongo DB, WebAssembly, and Clojure.
Individuals vs. Companies
When we analyzed our numbers, we also looked for differences in what individuals want to learn and what companies want their developers to learn.
For individuals, the trends were clearly towards web-technologies, with both front-end and back-end technologies taking up to 70% of the suggestions. On the other hand, for companies, the importance of topics seems more evenly distributed. Front-end technologies, general topics, Android and iOS topics were suggested 4–6 times. What is interesting though is that back-end technologies had only one suggestion. Python, however, is the leading topic here with 9 suggestions that were mainly related to Data Science. This shows some raised awareness in this field, and the need for software development skills in this area.
Beginners vs. Experienced
In our survey, when we asked individuals about their course topic suggestions, we also wanted to know whether they already had coding experience or not. With this data we wanted to see if beginners courses or expert courses where more in demand. The numbers here were quite clear.
Beginners made up 61%, while experts made up only 39%. This clearly shows us that there is a higher demand of beginners courses than expert courses.
Conclusions
While these numbers are a good indication for what is in demand, we know that we need to treat them with care. There are three big target groups–beginners who want to learn coding, experts who are already in the job and want to get better, and companies who want to train their staff–and all of them have different preferences and a different market. We, however, have limited resources in terms of teachers, time, and capital, and need to see for whom and what to provide first. But since we ran the numbers, we now have a good feeling for what we should focus on and what topics to address first.
Have we grabbed your attention? To learn more about our courses, visit us at hamburgcodingschool.com. Most of them are offline classroom courses in Hamburg, Germany, but we offer one or the other webinar as well. If you want to contribute to our ongoing surveys, fill out our survey form. Every contribution is highly appreciated.
