Code Platoon

Our goal is to decrease Veteran and military spouse underemployment ultimately. By creating a program that leads to high-paying and sustainable jobs, Veterans enjoy productive and profitable careers as software developers after their training with Code Platoon. Medium-term outcomes include spreading community awareness of Veteran’s abilities as professional developers and growing the program yearly to include more graduating classes.

Based in Chicago, Code Platoon provides software development training to help local Veterans and military spouses find meaningful careers as professional software developers.

Each Veteran and military spouse is eligible to receive a scholarship that covers about 80% of their tuition, making this career path affordable and attainable. Code Platoon also offers extra scholarships to female Veterans who join the bootcamp as they are historically underrepresented in technology-based careers. Our program is approved by the Department of Veteran Affairs, allowing our students to use their GI Bill benefits to participate.

The program consists of 25 students per class who spend 60-80 hours a week together for 15 weeks.
Instruction is a carefully curated mix of lectures, advanced coding training, and team projects, frequently
culminating in a local paid apprenticeship.

A cornerstone of Code Platoon is our corporate sponsors including: Change Healthcare, Grainger, Power
Reviews, and Raise.com. Our corporate sponsors contribute generously to our program and provide
apprenticeships to our students. We also enjoy generous grant support from The Cognizant Foundation, The Weinberg Foundation, Motorola Solutions Foundation, The McCormick Foundation, DRW Foundation, Accenture, and Capital One.

Code Platoon is one of only a handful of bootcamps that exclusively focuses on teaching Veterans these skills. We partner with industry experts to design our relevant and cutting-edge curriculum, ensuring our students are receiving the most up-to-date education. These corporate sponsorships allow our students access to high-level apprenticeships upon graduation, leading to lucrative full-time employment opportunities. We provide a direct link between our education and a career to our Veterans.

Code Platoon has graduated over 300 students since our inception. The majority of our graduates, 75%, have gone on to paid apprenticeships and/or full-time jobs as software development professionals. The median salary for these graduates in 2022 was $86,000. 24 months post-graduation the median salary of our graduates is $100,000. This is double the salary of a majority of our incoming students and a significant increase for most of the rest.

We have an excellent reputation on the two most popular clearing houses of information for coding bootcamps, coursereport.com and switchup.org--4.97 out of 5 stars with more than 100 reviews on each site.

In 2023 we expanded our curriculum to include DevOps engineering. We are consistently increasing our recruitment efforts to ensure more Veterans and military spouses know about our program and have the opportunity to explore this new career path.

Code Platoon transforms the lives of Veterans and military spouses by training them for meaningful and rewarding careers in the tech sector.