People are shelling out thousands to learn HTML

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.