2020 Q4 Jobs and Hiring Report

We are excited to close the year with a bright trend - more alumni accepted job offers in Q4 of 2020 than in Q4 of 2018 and 2019! And, given our ongoing career services and the sheer grit of our student body, we expect this trend to continue into 2021. It is exciting to see that after almost operating a year fully remotely, our graduates are both getting and receiving great jobs, demonstrating the quality and need of our graduates.

Before we go full speed into the new year, join us to take a look into the details of the Turing School job outcomes in the final quarter of 2020.

The Numbers

In 2020 Q4:

• One cohort graduated for a total of 39 new alumni.
• 55 Turing alumni accepted a job during Q4.
• The median time to hire was 103 days from graduation.
• Many graduates who had been looking since the start of COVID were able to find jobs this quarter, resulting in a longer median time, but we are proud that alumni who had been impacted by COVID-19 economic slowdowns are now working full-time!
• Median starting salary of first time hires was $75,000.
• If you are curious about a more detailed data breakdown you can download our self reported Q4 2020 Jobs Report.

The Jobs

Alumni get roles with titles including Junior Application Developer, Customer Success Engineer, Full Stack Rails Developer, and Software Engineer. Some companies that hired from Turing’s pool of graduates in Q4 include Twilio, Aetna Health, HomeAdvisor, Allstate, Colorado Public Radio and so many more.

Out of the 55 jobs alumni were offered in Q4, 38 were remote roles. The pandemic has forever changed our work environments and more people than ever are working in fulfilling full-time roles from home. Attending Turing fully online gives students time to build healthy remote work habits and learn their best practices for working on remote teams through student projects, making them ideal hires for remote companies.

Fellowships and full-time offers

In the spring, we launched a fellowship program called Turing+. Our goal is always to have our graduates land in a full-time role that they are excited about, but with the pandemic causing hiring slowdowns throughout the spring and early summer, we needed a solution that could get recent graduates working and gaining experience without losing their momentum. We’re glad to share that former fellows also found the experience valuable and some even ended up with full-time offers from their matched company.

The Turing Community

For the past few years, Turing has built organic relationships with partner companies and connected them with students via 1:1 outreach on Slack. This wasn’t an ideal system to pair companies with talent, so we finally launched an internal job board called Terminal. This is one place where companies can post jobs and have it made available to our pool of over 1100 alumni to explore making it easy for companies to get their information out to a diverse and hardworking group of developers with varying levels of experience.

Reflections From Our New Hires:

I'm really hard on myself and it's so challenging to feel fully satisfied with anything even if it's a great accomplishment. But I did end up with two fantastic job offers that offered me more compensation than I could've imagined making within less than a year of leaving my last job, and was late in the process with a third company that I think could've gone positively had I continued with them.

I loved having a career mentor and working with them helped me so much! I think I was able to improve how I was interviewing and presenting myself to companies.  I ended up getting a job I was not qualified for and I think having a mentor encourage me to go for any jobs and see how things go was very helpful.  Ultimately I think I struggled to keep myself motivated after facing disappointments and rejections, so having an external motivator was so helpful and would not have been something I sought out if Turing had not assigned a mentor to me.  

The company had never hired from bootcamps before but was very impressed with my GitHub code and contributions. The position happened to be a perfect fit, and I was able to negotiate the salary based on a Turing Career Specialist’s guidance. Overall the process was seamless and rewarding. Turing gave me so many helpful resources, as well as helped me train the most important trait of all--self-motivation to work hard for ME.

Even though my job search took me longer than I anticipated/wanted it to take, I'm really happy with the position, team, and company that I received an offer from. I'm excited to be starting soon because I think the company will be a really great fit for me. Also, this wouldn't have been possible without Robyn (Turing School Partnership Manager), who put me into contact with the company’s recruiter. From there, the process was pretty seamless. I'm also pleased with Turing's Career Services staff and alumni network. I had so many people offer to help me with resume review, mock interviews, referrals, etc. I felt really supported during my search even though it took a while due to the pandemic.

I appreciate the support that Turing provided with the career coaches. I personally needed to have that support to feel more connected, motivated, and accountable. I think this was extremely valuable and I'm thankful that it's something Turing does for graduates because job hunting can quickly feel lonely and overwhelming.

I had excellent help and guidance from Tracey (Turing School Career Specialist), even while I was interning at the company I got hired full time at.  She helped me take my Turing profile to the next level, get me in touch with people who helped me practice coding challenges, and helped me get up the courage to ask for a higher salary.