It was late 2011 when Nashville Software School (NSS) Founder and CEO, John Wark set out to find a solution to a challenge he frequently heard about in Nashville’s business community – the persistent shortage of trained tech talent such as software developers. The tech skills gap was (and is) a national problem, but Wark believed that there were proven, non-traditional training approaches to apply to the problem as well as an ample local supply of creative, underemployed adults with the latent aptitude for tech work. What if we focused on home-growing junior tech talent for the local job market?
Through conversations with interested leaders in Nashville’s tech community, Nashville Software School came to be. Founded in 2012 as one of the first half dozen coding bootcamps and as the nation’s first nonprofit coding bootcamp, Wark designed NSS to create opportunities for adults to transform their lives by training for high-income, interesting and engaging work in technology.
All of NSS’s career launch training programs are based on community input about the tech skills relevant to Nashville employers’ needs and designed to give students hands-on experience as web developers, software engineers, data analysts, or data scientists.
Wark is no stranger to entrepreneurial ventures, but this was his first non-profit. So it’s not surprising that NSS’s business model combines best practices from tech startups, education, and to nonprofits. Being a non-profit has helped NSS become rooted in the Nashville community and allowed them to try things that for-profit schools won’t – or can’t – do. For example, 50% of students attend NSS on the Nashville Opportunity Tuition plan – if those students don’t graduate and get a tech job, NSS doesn’t get paid. This shared risk approach aligns NSS’s incentives with students’ incentives. Many of the students on Opportunity Tuition are women, veterans, or people of color from outside tech’s traditional talent pool.
Not only has the business model been labeled innovative, but NSS approaches learning in a non-traditional, non-academic way. Through hands-on learning, students gain exposure to in-demand tech skills to prepare them for entry-level positions. Students learn not only individually, but through collaborative work on group projects. Project-based learning provides students an alternative way to learn technical skills and also a way to learn and practice collaboration, teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills that are critical to their being “job-ready” on graduation from NSS. By combining the science of learning with instructors’ own observations from the work environment and the classroom, they are continually evolving the teaching process.
“Nashville Software School is one of the best educational experiences I have had in my career and I’ve had a lot! NSS not only creates an environment that challenges learners, promotes deep thinking, and synthesis over rote memorization, it also makes the instructor disappear as the learner grows stronger in skill and confidence,” shares Dr. Teresa Vasquez.
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“Innovation isn’t always changing something. Sometimes it can be doing something old differently and that is how I view NSS. It is a leader in doing education right!”
– Teresa Vasquez, MBA, EdD Graduate, Web Developer Bootcamp Cohort 21 (2017)
Ten years and over 2000 graduates later, NSS is thriving in Nashville and beyond. The school’s impact is clear: 90% of their graduates find jobs in tech within six months of graduation. Fueled by Nashville’s booming tech job market, NSS’s impact will continue to grow as they add programs targeting new career pathways and connect with students across a larger geographic area through their live, online classrooms. NSS currently offers programs in full-stack web development, software engineering (in collaboration with Amazon), front-end web design/development, data analytics, and data science. As NSS enters its second decade in 2023, they look forward to continuing to expand to help meet the talent needs of Nashville’s exploding tech economy through ever more accessible pathways into tech careers for motivated adult learners.
