NEXT Academy

I just graduated as part of March 2016 batch of NEXT Academy and I would recommend it to everybody who looks to jump-start their programming career. Nine weeks in NEXT were definitely a very intense experience as everyday you need to process a huge amount of information so it might prove very challenging if this is not your learning style.

Luckily, mentors were very helpful and supportive throughout the entire course answering questions and holding break-out sessions. Social aspect of Academy was great too as meeting new friends, becoming part of community and networking is important.

On top of it, NEXT just started holding industry/career events (last one was with AirAsia CTO) which I am really glad as it helps new grads to land jobs.

Generally, I believe they could do a better job in selecting applicants to bring up overall quality of class. This will probably come naturally as applicant pool widens so they can afford to be more selective.

Overall, it is a great value for money and the best platform to get into coding in this part of the world.

Setting aside three months to learn coding at NEXT Academy was one of the best decisions that I have made. Besides learning how to write code and build applications, I also gained a strong foundation for further self-learning. Building applications and coding is not just about writing code; it's also about learning how to solve problems. The bootcamp was challenging and involved intense problem-solving exercises. It's one of the toughest things I've done but also one of the most rewarding. After the course, I began freelancing and have even been offered positions as CTO in startups. It definitely opened up a whole new career path for me. 

I joined the December 2015 batch, and just like others from the same batch. We have to give out our 3 month of full commitment to this course where 90% of us there gave up their previous job and really hope can change their life by attending this course. As Next Academy advertised, "No coding knowledge required", "Make your idea into a real working web application in 9 weeks!" and more. 

Throughout the course, most of their teaching materials or the content of their online learning portal were gathered from other online 3rd party free resources like Codecademy.com and others. Most of the content we can get from those free online coding course, but the difference here are we pay for it rather than get it free. So, what is the point here? They do have mentors stationed during the class for assisting purposes, however I only can say that most of their mentors perhaps a good programmers, but not really a good tutor. Most of the students are like me, without any coding experience before this, but they are not really good at teaching us the basics. They required us to finish certain learning tasks within a day, but for most of us that cannot finish, they will not wait and just go to the next lesson another day. By doing this for a few weeks, some of us are left really behind and couldn't catch up with that. 

On the other hand, they used to mention that they will provide us with many job opportunities and even a career day where we can meet with many company who wanted to hire web developers. But know what? More than 70% of us still hasn't got any web developers job after 3 months we graduate. What's wrong with their 99% of the graduates get to start their own startup or get job as coders. What I get from my batchmates are most of us just head back from where we came from and really feel bad of wasted our time here. But one thing, we make friends, that is the only good thing here but I guess I can make friend somewhere else and not paying 10,000 MYR for a place with Wi-Fi and Air-cond.

Then, they also did mention that they will provide continuous support for some period after we graduate from there to make sure we are ready for whatever coming up on coding. But you know what? Bullshit. Now when we chat them and ask about some technical question, they will either ignore you or just left you uncare. It is really a big difference from what they promise and told us.

There are so much more to talk about. But in conclusion, we are giving up alot of our life to get ourselves enrolled in the course and end up we didn't even have the sufficient skills to build our own web application or didn't even think that we are good enough to join development team or get a job. Finally, do think twice before applying it because there is no such thing as ZERO coding knowledge to WORLD CLASS Junior Developers in 9 weeks. I can get even a better coding course and much more support just paying Treehouse or Udemy for less than 50 USD.

I believe almost everyone who joined this bootcamp is due to the fact that NEXT advertised their bootcamp so aggressively saying that you could build a webapp in 9 weeks! Wow..how impressive is that and life changing! 

Believe me, this will not be happening if you are paying RM10,000 to join this bootcamp. As I observed, most of the students here left their daily job, thinking of learning life changing new skill that could provide them a better career or future ( NEXT claimed that 95% graduates are employed after the bootcamp). However, the syllabus most of them you could get it from the Internet, and I could guarantee that they will ask you to go to a website, do their tutorials to learn and you will ask yourself "WTF?"

As for the mentors, most of them I would say they are helpful and trying to help us most of them time, however we are lacked of mentors as its like 3 mentors VS 20+ students, how would they possible to help? NEXT is responsible in this but not the mentors. 

After almost the end of the course, I could see most of us are still not really good at the front end, we did confess to the mentors or even to their VP, all the answers we got is "front end is not so importantly". Hello, we are here to learn to be a full stack developer and we only have ONE day to learn HTML + CSS and ONE day to learn Javescript. I think you will be building a 1990s website after this bootcamp. 

Lastly, don't ever expect that NEXT will care about your career or anything after you have graduated ! They do have "job opportunities" group chat in slack, and let me tell you my story. Josh, the FOUNDER of NEXT who is also going to held a CAREER TALK, posted a job opportunities in slack. I am so interested and PM him, once, twice, no reply. Ya, you get it right, he just ignored. So a founder that doesn't care about graduates, how would the others do? 

I have a lot more to say but I think it's getting to long here. My advice would be, stay out of this bootcamp, make good use of your RM10,000 in other stuff or even other bootcamp ( I believe there's a better one out there). 

...would be how I would describe my Next Academy experience in a nutshell. Nine weeks from zero to world-class junior full stack developer, with alumni/job networking support and personalized mentor attention? As per mentioned, not quite. 

The syllabus is alright enough: after a gruelling initial 2 weeks of computer science/Ruby immersion, there was (barely) a week of front-end learning, followed by a week with the Sinatra framework before scaling up to Rails. The disappointing aspect was the utter lack of attention paid to Javascript. The ONLY syllabus dedicated to it was a one day lesson, complete the (free) JS track on Codeacademy. Bearing in mind that since most folks shelled out about RM10k for this bootcamp, using a 3rd party free resource as part of the syllabus was downright infuriating. We also learned very little about the git workflow and nothing about Agile development practices, which I realized were very essential to a coder's skillset post-graduation. 

I cannot fault the mentors themselves, as many of them do try their best and some do look out for the well being of their students. It is worth noting however that almost the entirety of their staff are former graduates of the program and not all possess industry experience. That may or may not be a game changer for you. 

The execution of the bootcamp itself was where they really fell through. Students would be told that certain elements of the program would be done one way only to be notified otherwise at the last moment. My batch had 2 assessments mid-camp where we were told that those who did not make the grade would be forced to defer to the following intake. Yet everybody made it through including those who barely touched their assessment, and this led to the detriment of everybody as a whole during the final group project. 

To describe their claim of personalized mentoring would be a stretch. My batch had 20-25 students and combined with the other intake of roughly that number meant that Next only had 3-4 mentors max available per batch. As one would expect, this resulted in many students floundering about wondering how to begin their daily work. Breakout sessions, where mentors would teach the basic concepts of the day on a whiteboard/projector traditional-style were very, very rare. To top if off, there were no recaps at the end of the day to determine if what we did was on the right path or not. This resulted in a snowballing effect where some students would get progressively left further and further behind as the course progressed. 

I have no idea where they get their 95% post-graduate employment figures from, as none of the Next staff had bothered to contact me or my peers about our status save for invitations to their events. Also, bear in mind that although a few former graduates have gotten into the bigwigs of the Malaysian startup scene (Kfit, Mindvalley, etc), the employment scene has changed since and most of the bigwigs do not consider junior developers anymore, barring a few exceptions. 

To sum it all up, I would definitely say that the bootcamp was not worth the RM10k I spent on it. The Next marketing team does a superb job of selling themselves but cares little for its students once the money changes hands. If you are considering Next, please do yourself a favor and reach out to former graduates not currently under Next's payroll and get another honest opinion. 
 

MYR9,540 for 9 weeks course.

I wouldn't pay that much to learn to code, i could go to Udemy/Treehouse/Lynda.com and provide myself a space i.e my room/office to learn. I think i have better Internet compared to them. 

The learning material is all available online. Like, Hey! Here's our material that we modified and called our own. The lessons that are available online are more clear instructed compared to theirs.

By paying Rm10k to learn get provided a space and internet.

TL;DR version: Learn somewhere else. i.e: Treehouse/Udemy/Lynda.com. Don't waste your time waking up early. Learn in your own BatCave(room). 

I attended the bootcamp graduated on January 2016. I moved to Malaysia all the way from the United Kingdom and it was one of the best decisions in my life. 

I did a big research of where to attend a bootcamp by the cost and quality - the NEXT Academy won even though I had to fly so far. The price is fantastic in compare with other bootcamps and with the quality I was more than happy. Living cost is cheaper than anywhere else in Europe / USA.

I learned what I wanted and I became a software developer within two months. The bootcamp is challenging in all ways but together with other students, we managed to go through it with a big support of great mentors. 

During my journey in the NEXT Academy I was writing a blog: http://malacademy.tumblr.com - you can check how it is to study in Malaysia & NEXT.