Bootcamps, Predatory Inclusion, and Accessing the Tech-Work Lifestyle Dream

• In Event: 40812 - Professions and Occupations

Abstract

Tech coding bootcamps are short-cycle, low-barrier, flexible, certificate programs that set out to train workers without programming skills for entry level tech jobs at costs often around $10,000, but potentially considerably higher. These programs are part of a larger for-profit-education industry, typically operating as independent for-profit businesses. They also tend to attract larger shares of women and minority students who are otherwise underrepresented in tech. This paper asks whether and under what conditions these programs provide mobility pathways, particularly for underrepresented workers, or if they are better described as examples of predatory inclusion. Drawing on 69 longitudinal and retrospective interviews conducted over two years with 45 graduates of non-degree coding skills training programs, we find that gender, parenting, and immigration status shape graduates’ decision-making about the programs as well as their post-program tech-job search experiences. We use the metaphor of bridges, ladders, and cul de sacs to conceptualize whether workers experience horizontal, rather than vertical, career changes, find pathways to upward mobility, or return to where they started before the program. Women tended to use the programs as bridges between professional jobs, seeking, and getting, less upward mobility from the programs. Immigrant workers more often went through the programs like cul-de-sacs, returning to their pre-program occupation at the end—for immigrants who were also primary caregivers to young children, this often meant remaining out of the labor market. Based on these findings we argue that gender and immigration status structure inclusion, shaping whether graduates experience with the same program was predatory or propulsive.

Authors

• Sharla N. Alegria, University of Toronto

• Natalie Julia Anastasia Adamyk, University of Toronto

• Emily Hammond, University of Toronto