Northcoders - Manchester

Ahmad Y.

Northcoders provided an excellent hands-on learning experience with a well-structured curriculum and supportive instructors. Slack made collaboration easy, though Zoom had occasional issues. Overall, it gave me the confidence and skills to progress in software development. Highly recommended!

Adam W.

Northcoders is a very supportive organisation, with passionate teachers. I have gained so much from them in droves even after the course. I wish they turned over less students because finding a junior role is hard but overall I had a very positive experience.

Zabihullah H.

I had an excellent experience with Northcoders during my Data Engineering bootcamp. The curriculum was well-structured, covering essential industry skills like Python, SQL, AWS, and CI/CD, all reinforced through hands-on projects. The instructors were knowledgeable, supportive, and always available to help with challenges.

The collaborative environment was a highlight—working in teams on real-world problems prepared me well for the industry. The final project, where we built a full ETL pipeline on AWS, was particularly valuable in applying what we learned.

Northcoders provided a great mix of technical training, mentorship, and career support. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to break into data engineering.

Yana

It has been an incredible experience for me. ☺️ The supportive mentors and focus on real-world projects helped me build my confidence as a developer. The collaborative environment and focus on pair programming and TDD really sharpened my problem-solving skills. I highly recommend Northcoders to anyone looking to transition into tech or level up their coding skills. 🚀

Benjamin C.

The course itself is informative and intensive however an extremely cutthroat environment. In reality you need to be at a median level of coding before starting this. A lot of the activities are just there to tick a box in regards to OFSTED. My only real complaint however is how easily they cut people. If they deem you to not be at an appropiate level to help fufill thier graduating statistics they will remove you, this certainly isn't made clear prior to starting the course, you have 4 weeks before they make you undertake an assesment and are constantly leaving learners in a state of fear as many people quit their jobs in order to do this course, more transparency is needed to help people understand that if you have a palce you are not guranteed to stay on the course. The cohorts are too large in order to give learners enough individual focus.

However, I will say that the tutors are good, but stretched too thin. I would reccomend a different provider who takes smaller cohorts. However others have had a positive experience, but this was just my personal experience.

Catherine P.

A great experience from start to finish: really enthusiastic tutors and mentors, loads of one-to-one help if you want it, a very well-structured and organised course, and an impressive amount of content covered in the time available. It does move at a fast pace, but most of the time you are putting what you've learnt that day into practice, so it's not too overwhelming. Be aware that there aren't a huge number of opportunities being advertised through the jobsboard, and it feels like a generally competitive time for finding entry-level jobs in this area, so you will want to be searching for jobs externally too and ready to accept it might take a little while to land that first role. Overall a great experience though and definitely made me excited to pursue a career in software development. Thanks very much Northcoders!

Zac H.

I highly recommend Northcoders if you're thinking of making the jump to software development. It was a great experience. The material was top notch, the structure of the course seemed just right and the support was great. It really gave me a strong foundation in-full stack development but more importantly, made me feel confident in applying for junior dev roles. I was able to secure a role just 2 months after completing the bootcamp.

Serp

NC is nothing special sadly, it's the same as all intensive boot camps whereby when you scratch away the shiny veneer it's just a conveyor belt throwing out people with wildly inconsistent abilities.

There's a lot of self learning with NC & they focus on test driven, pair programming which means your experience can be greatly affected by who you're with.
There's only one speed, with inconsistent difficulty & set tasks that some will complete & others won't.
If you fall behind, there's no additional help, just false platitudes to drag you to the end of the course.

The quality of the course is also hit & miss as they try to fit too much in so the fundamentals & backend sections were very well done but the frontend section was sorely lacking & felt very rushed.

The reason for such a low score is that I was rather rudely spoken to by a team member (angrily belittled) & made to redo a section that put me behind; it upset me but I wouldn't be beaten as I saw this as the launchpad to a new career.
I spent weekends/evenings catching back up only to get a bug that I couldn't fix or understand and when I tried to get help all I got is "sorry we've moved on from that" from multiple staff on multiple occasions; this despite it being a key part of the course that had to be completed to get post-course support & access to their job board etc.

From that moment I stopped believing the lie they parrot of "trust the process" and realised it's just to keep you rolling along without thinking too much until it's too late. I realised that for all the banter, none of the staff genuinely cared about students enough to spend a few minutes getting me back on track.

The experience left me deflated & made it very hard to get motivated to code for a long time after the course; something I'd loved doing daily for months before starting.

I wasn't going to leave a review but it's been well over a year & I still think about it every time I code.
No doubt there's a lot of similar experiences out there but former students generally keep quiet because they don't want to feel they wasted a lot of time, effort &/or money nor do they want to reduce the perceived value of having Northcoders on their CV.