Bootcamps: a New Path for Occupational Entry

As the traditional employment relationship has deteriorated in the U.S. and in much of the world, the nature of careers has been changing. Formal organizations no longer serve as holding environments for people’s careers. Workers today have to continually navigate an external labor market, construct their careers out of a series of jobs or short-term gigs, and take responsibility for training and (re)training themselves to remain employable over time. Despite the burgeoning literature examining workers’ efforts at constructing and navigating their careers in the new economy, we still know relatively little about how workers attempt to reskill themselves for growing occupations.This dissertation utilizes a unique setting—coding bootcamps—to examine how workers attempt to reskill themselves for growing job areas without traditional organizations serving as the backdrop for their actions. At the time of fieldwork, coding bootcamps were still a nascent industry that had not become an accepted part of the institutional landscape of work and employment. They represented an alternative, vocational path of entry to a highly coveted occupation in the digital economy. Despite the liability of their newness, they attracted thousands of career switchers.I draw on 80 semi-structured interviews and observations conducted at two comparable field sites in Silicon Valley over the course of 17 months of fieldwork to document the occupational entry process of career switchers trying to reskill themselves by attending bootcamps. My findings suggest that bootcamps resembled learning collectives where self-learning and learning from peers and near-peers figured more prominently than expert instruction. Under conditions of minimal expert instruction and obstacles to legitimate peripheral participation, I show how aspiring software developers sought out an occupational community in virtual spaces, learned asynchronously from unknown others, developed their practice through mock-work among themselves and managed to get hired as a new category of occupational entrant—‘the bootcamp graduate.’ This dissertation contributes to our understanding of employability management practices and under-institutionalized learning and socialization processes in contemporary careers.