The best coding bootcamps in Europe in 2022

This article was originally published on .cult by Luis Minvielle. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world.

Many people might feel old in 2022 (remember how the 2012 London Olympics seem to have happened just yesterday? The 10-year-anniversary YouTube promotional video might drop anytime), but being aging and cranky shouldn’t stop anyone from attempting to become a programmer.

With an ever-demanding tech market, researchers expect the German IT market to be worth US$129 billion in 2025 — boosting tech jobs all over the world. If you’re interested in making a career move, bootcamps might be the quickest path to learning programming from scratch.

Bootcamps promise to teach students to learn to code quickly, and such audacity has earned them their ill fame. But, getting to the facts, bootcamps are a convenient instrument for professionals — from any discipline — attempting to pivot to programming.

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Statistics show that the median age for bootcamp students is 31 years old — so you won’t feel alone in your aging blues. And almost 8 out of 10 bootcamp students landed a job in the six months following course completion in 2020. It’s a telling figure, more so because, in 2020, most of the world had to adapt to working (and learning) in a purely remote way, where personal connections have to be replaced with after-hours cocktails held over lo-fi Zoom calls.

Bootcamps are incredibly reputable for connecting individuals: students may become business partners and develop their code in a business-minded approach right after course completion. That’s why, in 2021, bootcamps such as Le Wagon bumped up their employment figures to an impressive 93%, just a month after course completion.

Many bootcamps in Europe are offering a mixed multi-location or online model. There are specs that differentiate each coding school, though such as the syllabus, total investment, course duration, admission process, etc. Certain bootcamps may appeal to an aspiring Data Scientist, while others may be fit for someone shooting for a position as a Multi-Cloud Integrator.

Here are some of the best coding bootcamps to attend in Europe in 2022:

1. Le Wagon (Berlin, Cologne, Munich and more locations)

If you were secretly planning to attend a coding bootcamp just to move out to a different city and have a fresh start, first make sure that Le Wagon doesn’t have a campus in your town. This excellent coding bootcamp has campuses spread across 44 cities. Twenty-three of these campuses are in Europe, including Berlin, Cologne, and Munich. Le Wagon offers full-time (nine weeks) and part-time (six months) courses, mainly on full-stack web development and data science.

Le Wagon’s graduates from their European campuses often find employment only 34 days after finishing their courses. On the other hand, Le Wagon’s 6,000+ alumni network is set to be bolstered with remote-only graduates: Le Wagon offers Web Development and Data Science courses under their Remote Bootcamp mode, which is experienced as a live lecture.  Le Wagon already claims their alumni community stacks up more than 13,000 people. Not a bad number to network with!

Watch our Coding Bootcamp Documentary featuring Le Wagon students.

2. Spiced (Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart)

Spiced is a more boutique alternative to Le Wagon. With campuses in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Stuttgart, plus the option to attend lessons online, Spiced offers two twelve-week programmes: one on Web Development, the other on Data Science. But they’re about to add a third option: Data Analytics. This nine-week course will help heavy users of spreadsheets — with zero programming experience — to crack the codes behind data insights. The syllabus includes topics such as the basics of Python, exploring varied datasets, statistics, visualization, storing data on PostgreSQL, and dashboards.

3. Coders Lab (Kraków and more locations)

Hailing from the country that graced the entertainment industry with video games such as The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, Coders Lab is a, well, hefty coding bootcamp. Founded in Poland in 2013, it now has campuses in more than five countries. Coders Lab boasts a median of 188.5 hours of live classes with a lecturer — 50% more than other bootcamps. It may require a brawny, athletic brain to get through it, but the eight-week bootcamp promises to prepare students for a developer career and thus pay for the hectic days of coding. Coders Lab offers courses on Python  and JavaScript development and has a network of 8,000 alumni.

4. Academia de Código (Lisbon and more locations)

In Portuguese, reprogramar means to “program something once again,” but it also means to hard-wire something all over again. Academia de Código, a prolonged bootcamp experienced in different cities across Portugal, promises to hard-wire your life once again for a new start. If you attend their 14-week bootcamp, you’ll go from a coding noob to an employable full-stack developer. This is because the bootcamp has 7-day weeks with roughly 13-hour days (I guess they put the ‘bootcamp’ in bootcamp).

As their webpage says, “coding takes work:” Fourteen weeks equal to 650 hours of total immersion — or what it’d take to drive from Berlin to Lisbon twelve times back and forth. But, as they also explain, coding “gives employment.”

5. Founders and Coders (London)

Founders and Coders promises to train you in people skills and web development tools — JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Git, Project Management — in a twelve-week bootcamp. Based in London, Founders and Coders is a non-profit bootcamp. This means their courses are tuition-free, so you shouldn’t worry about converting your hard-earned savings to the pound. Guided by their core values of “cooperation, inclusion and social impact,” the bootcamp is really selective about their students, but they still welcome people from all backgrounds. Founders and Coders is slated to be held online and starts in March, but check their website for any updates about in-person courses.