Coding bootcamp Tech Elevator is setting up its sixth campus in Philly

Cleveland-based coding bootcamp company Tech Elevator announced this week it’s opening its sixth campus in Philadelphia.

The career reskilling company launched in 2014 in Ohio and has since opened shop in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. The Philly campus is currently accepting applications for the 14-week, full-time program, which will start in early 2020.

“Philly is a community and an economy that has a really mismatched supply and demand,” Tech Elevator CEO Anthony Hughes said, with “thousands” of unfilled jobs in the tech and computer sciences fields.

(In February, we reported that Philly’s tech industry added 8,000 new jobs since 2013, and there were around 100,000 people employed at tech companies large and small.)

The bootcamps teach Java, which Hughes says is one of the “most in demand” programs, and .Net, the Microsoft framework. The goal is to reskill folks who may not have any experience in software and “convert them into job-ready software developers,” he said.

The programs have graduated hundreds in its existing cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit and Pittsburgh — not cities known for being large tech hubs. Yet virtually every student graduates from the program and receives a job offer in the field within 180 days, according to Hughes.

Philly, the eastern-most and largest city to be added to the list, is perfectly placed between tech hubs on the East Coast, the CEO said. (Read more about why the city was picked in Hughes’ LinkedIn explainer.)

“You know, Philly was known as the workshop of the world,” Hughes said. “We don’t want to look back at the early 1900s and think, ‘Those were the glory days,’ we have to reinvent for the modern economy.”

That’s the sentiment Hughes and cofounder David Wintrich have run with in the creation and growth of Tech Elevator: Technology is the future of work, and companies will need to adapt to succeed.

The location of the Philly campus hasn’t yet been decided, but Hughes said it will be somewhere in Center City so it’s easily accessible by public transit. The cohort will likely start out as a smaller group of 15 to 20 students, but class sizes will grow as more cohorts of students work through the Philly program.

The 14-week course costs $15,500, and Hughes said some hiring partners in the region so far include Accenture, PNC and JP Morgan Chase. After January’s inaugural class, there will be three cohorts a year.

Tech Elevator will join the ranks of Penn LPS Coding Bootcamp, Springhouse and other local skills building programs of various lengths and intensities in their mission of training the next generation of tech pros.