How many of you feel like the only way to get a job in media nowa­days is to have a cod­ing school back­ground? If this is the case, don’t feel like you’re wrong, there are cur­rent­ly hun­dreds of cod­ing schools pop­ping up every­where for the sheer rea­son that find­ing pro­gram­mers is get­ting hard­er and hard­er to find. Some of the rea­sons for this is the real­ly good ones want to get paid lots and lots of mon­ey or they want very flex­i­ble work and won’t jive with your work envi­ron­ment. Take for instance One Month founder Mat­tan Grif­fel, who orig­i­nal­ly built One Month, an online cod­ing school because he was frus­trat­ed after unsuc­cess­ful­ly search­ing for a coder to build out a start­up idea.

The Flat­iron School offers a 12 weeks of full-time, inten­sive instruc­tion (plus pre-work) “designed to turn you into a web devel­op­er” for a $10,000 tuition fee. Avi Flom­baum states “The way I got seri­ous about tech­nol­o­gy in high school wasn’t’ through build­ing things. It was through hack­ing and lock-pick­ing and crack­ing Wi-Fi pass­words and mak­ing free phone calls,”. But even Flat­iron School’s adult pro­gram­ming class­es are run less like math class­es than cre­ative writ­ing class­es. Stu­dents build projects, review and dis­cuss each other’s work, and then rewrite them.

Flom­baum says. “I think there’s a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of what this craft is about. If more peo­ple saw it the way I see it and the stu­dents see it, every­one would want to be a pro­gram­mer.” A high school pro­gram by the Flat­iron School is taught by teach­ers from dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy start­up Skill­crush, will sim­i­lar­ly focus on the fun and prac­ti­cal side of pro­gram­ming. Are the coders they send off into the world good enough to keep their jobs? Flat­iron Pres­i­dent Adam Enbar, says “No one has been let go yet,… we pay real­ly close atten­tion to that.”

Full­stack Acad­e­my is an immer­sive, full-time, 3‑month web devel­op­ment course in New York City that pre­pare stu­dents for jobs at tech firms and star­tups. Stu­dents will learn full-stack web devel­op­ment, and devel­op­er cul­ture. Mas­ter JavaScript + MVC, HTML5, CSS3, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, APIs and Libraries, SQL, rela­tion­al data­bas­es, NOSQL, Git Ver­sion Con­trol, Text Edi­tors, Test-Dri­ven Devel­op­ment, and Shell and Sys­tems. Full­stack also offers a 16-week, part-time pro­gram for those who need more flexibility.

This is just the tip of the ice­berg, there’s Gen­er­al Assem­bly, Code Acad­e­my. All of them pro­vid­ing immer­sive instruc­tion to tak­ing some­one that knows noth­ing about cod­ing and turn­ing them into some­one who could be employed at a start-up or tech com­pa­ny. Some­thing to con­sid­er for sure if you’re look­ing for that per­fect media job.