Career Accelerators: Not Your Grandpa’s Bootcamp — In Fact, Not a Bootcamp at All

One of the most common questions we get from employers, students/parents, and investors is, “So, are you just a bootcamp?”

The answer is, “Not even #$%@ing close.”

There are several reasons why pega6—and the career accelerator category we're creating—is fundamentally different from bootcamps, but it all boils down to the outcomes we produce.

bootcamp students graduate with familiarity, while pega6 students graduate with mastery

If you need a little bit of clarity on what we mean by mastery vs. familiarity, check out this handy-dandy graphic below. (Pretty cool, huh?!)

why don’t bootcamps can’t deliver mastery

Because the can’t.

Why can’t they? Time.

Mastery (and when we say “mastery,” we mean entry-level mastery) takes one year of full-time commitment.

No more. No less. It’s the universal human learning curve for entry-level mastery.

I know what you’re thinking. “For realz?! How do you know that?”

We know it through ubiquitous anecdote. That’s to say, think about yourself at your first job, your friends’ first jobs, or anyone who’s ever worked for you as their first employer.

Go ahead. Think about it. I dare you.

You started as a “zero” in that you had little to no idea what you were doing or how to do it.

However, around the one-year mark, you realized, “I finally got this.” Not from a Director or VP level, but from an entry-level, you finally knew what you were doing, how to do it, and how to use the tools to get it done. That’s when you went from a zero to a one, from liability to a legitimate contributor.

And that’s how long it’s taken almost every single entry-level employee to go from zero to one. Not four months. Not four years. One year. That’s the timeline to mastery.

Now, taking us back to the original statement that bootcamps can’t deliver mastery, the reason becomes clear—most bootcamps are one to six months long or part-time. Thus, they literally cannot produce students who possess mastery because there isn’t sufficient time to do it. The best they can do is proficiency, but most only achieve familiarity.

“Okay, hotshot. Then how long are pega6’s career accelerator programs,” you ask indignantly.

40–50 hours per week for 1 year; 2,000–2,500 hours total

That duration and level of intensity is intentional. Decades of real life work experience for tens of millions of Americans have shown that’s how long it takes to achieve entry-level mastery, so that’s how we structured our program.

reps + variety = mastery

We’ve established how long it takes to achieve mastery, but what happens during that year that actually enables someone to achieve it?

The answer: lectures and textbooks

KIDDING!!!

No one ever mastered a skill through listening and reading.

At our career accelerators, students learn exclusively by doing. From day one, our students build commercial-grade software in cross-functional teams. Developers and PMs working together like they would in the real world.

Now, while learning-by-doing is necessary for achieving mastery, it’s the nature of the doing that separates the accelerators from the bootcamps.

The key to mastery is
repetition and variety.

It’s not enough to simple learn by doing. Imagine trying to learn to ride a bike by getting to ride it twice or mastering the piano by playing it a dozen times. It can’t happen, and that’s because you need to get the requisite number of reps in to achieve mastery. And it’s the same with software development and product management and any other job; it takes a lot of reps to make that journey from zero to one.

However, repetition alone is not sufficient. Students need to encounter a variety of scenarios, contexts, tools, methods, team dynamics, and problems to expose and then address gaps in their fundamental knowledge.

Imagine trying to teach someone what a chair is by only showing them images of chairs with a black frame, brown leather seat, and white cloth back. That homogenous approach would never lead to someone achieving mastery over a domain.

And this where the duration of the program becomes critical.

With the one- to six-month bootcamp programs, students can’t get the variety needed for mastery because there isn’t even enough time for sufficient reps on one flavor of the areas to which they’re exposing students.

But with pega6’s career accelerators, not only is one year more than sufficient to get enough reps in on a single type of language, framework, tool, etc., but it also provides enough time for the students to work with additional languages (Python and Java), frameworks (React and Vue), tools (Github Copilot and Cursor), etc. to achieve entry-level mastery.

soft skills

To be a first-year employee who’s the caliber of a second- or third-year employee, you need more than just technical skills. You need soft skills—grit, communication, professionalism, and emotional intelligence, among others. In fact, in virtually any employer survey conducted over the last decade, the top demanded skills are soft skills.

Bootcamps don’t even try. That’s just not part of their approach. Most students either work alone or on homogeneous teams comprised solely of students in their discipline (e.g., developers only working with developers).

Whereas with pega6, we don’t simply “teach” soft skills. We bake them into every build, every day, every interaction. Because nothing teaches professional skills like working in cross-functional teams under pressure, with real deadlines and deliverables.

So not only do our students graduate with mastery of the technical skills, but they also achieve mastery of the soft skills.

at the heart of it all . . . student body composition

Now you’re probably wondering, “Dude, if your outcomes really are so much better, then why won’t bootcamps just copy you?”

The answer to your stupid question is . . . they can’t. (I’m kidding, there aren’t any stupid questions. Just stupid people who ask questions.)

why bootcamps can’t copy our model all boils down to who their student body is

Bootcamps serve career switchers. People with mortgages, kids, and bills to pay. These types of students can’t take a year off without income. So, to accommodate and attract these customers, bootcamp programs must be part-time or no more than several months long.

Thus, bootcamps literally can’t offer programs of sufficient duration that result in mastery.

On the other hand, we’ve created pega6 to be a superior alternative to college. Consequently, we serve graduating high school seniors. These are students who were already planning to forgo income for four years. So, our one-year full-time program is absolutely no problem for them. (In fact, they’re thrilled because they get to start their careers three years early!)

This fundamental difference between the student bodies of bootcamps vs. career accelerators echos throughout the business models of both and makes it impossible for them to effectively compete with us.

and another thing

There are several other important ways in which accelerators differ from bootcamps, but they relate more to the scope and scalability of our business model than to our educational outcome. So, I’ve just lumped them here in this last section. Enjoy!

Career Paths. Bootcamps are narrowly focused on tech. We’re starting there too—but eventually, we’ll expand into hundreds of white collar career paths across dozens of industries. Software today. Everything else tomorrow.

Real Estate. Most career switchers can’t uproot their lives. Thus, to grow beyond their initial market, bootcamps need a location in every city where they want students. We need just one location because high school grads have relocated to pursue a post-secondary education for hundreds of years.

Recruiting. Career switchers can be anyone (a science teacher, an attorney, a barista), so to find their recruits, bootcamps need to look . . . everywhere. That leads to a high customer acquisition cost and economics that are difficult to scale. We recruit from high schools (specifically, STEM high schools to start). We know exactly where our students are. And once our outcomes speak for themselves, they’ll come to us, just like they do with current crop of prestigious post-secondary institutions.

Agile Curriculum Bootcamps use largely content-based curricula. Changing them is like turning a cruise ship—slow, painful, and often avoided. We’ve created a product-based curriculum. If Python dies and “Watermelon” becomes the next established backend language, we just . . . tell our students to use Watermelon in the next build. Done. Instant curricular agility.

bottom line

Bootcamps were built to serve a different kind of student, at a different life stage, with very different needs. That’s fine. But they will always be constrained by that fact.

We built pega6’s career accelerators to solve “the university problem.” Thus, we were able to build an institution of higher education designed to and capable of producing graduates with mastery of the precise skills they will need to crush it in the workforce.

So, to answer your question—no, we’re not just a bootcamp.