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People are shelling out thousands to learn HTML

HackerYou, Lighthouse Labs and Bitmaker are arming tech newbies with coding skills

By Emily Landau

| September 18, 2017

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Toronto’s future tech prosperity is a numbers game: Canada will require 218,000 new coders, developers and designers by 2020. But currently, our colleges and universities are only churning out about 29,000 new techies every year, creating a massive shortfall. To bridge the gap, the city is welcoming an influx of new private colleges like HackerYou, Lighthouse Labs and Bitmaker, all of which offer eight- to 12-week boot camps for $9,000 to $12,000. Students train, Rocky-style, in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and responsive design courses. They enter the program as coding virgins and leave as tech geniuses—alumni from HackerYou, for instance, have gone on to find jobs at Scotiabank Digital, Deloitte and Ryerson’s DMZ incubator.

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