I am a 25 year old professional ecologist. I have been self teaching myself html, css, and javascript because I want to pursue web development (and possibly other areas of programming). I think I would enjoy the work more because it involves problem solving day to day and requires creativity. It also seems like there is no shortage of jobs that pay well.
I am thinking about going to a community college in town to get an A.S. in software development. I already have a B.S. and a M.S. so I could likely transfer a lot of credits. I would only have to complete the core courses for the degree. I could do this in about 2 semesters full time and for a little over 5k.
Do you think my job prospects would be improved dramatically by having an Associates degree in the field as opposed to only having unrelated B.S. and M.S. degrees?
I want to add that I understand employers would still want to see an impressive portfolio.
If the program has an internship, yes. Otherwise, no. I earned my A.S. in Comp Sci a year ago (I also have an unrelated B.S.) and I’ve landed only a handful of interviews, no followups of any kind. It’s now been four months without an interview; nothing but form rejections in my inbox every morning.
My situation is unusual, however, because of my almost complete lack of job experience. I naively assumed that the degree and class/hobby projects would compensate for that. I was wrong. I doubt any employer has even bothered going to my Github page. One of them did ask me about my projects but, despite my gushing enthusiasm (lol), I was rejected the next day without comment. I finally did get a job – working part-time at a supermarket.
This is just my experience. Whether you go for another degree or not, I wish you the best of luck.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I think I’m going to stick with self teaching for a while while focusing on building some projects for myself and, hopefully, others for free.
If you want to get an education just to get a diploma, then this is not worth it. If your training will open new opportunities for internships and work for you, give you a good base, then you should. If you click here for more info you can find an article that made me think about what I should do. Probably, after it I began to think about the importance of creating projects and programs that are really important and necessary, so I went to the university, which gave me knowledge in the area that would help me create such a program.
I think for the slightly higher cost, it’d benefit you more to enter a bootcamp instead.
I’m an ex-microbiology graduate student that returned to school to get a CS BS, but then dropped out to attend bootcamp, and for me, bootcamp did more to prepare me for a job than 2 year of CS coursework