Finding a job after graduating any schooling — bootcamps included — can be an intimidating process. It’s especially difficult to go through the job search alone.

Unique to App Academy, our Career Coaches work with students one-on-one to help them prepare for, interview for, and formally accept their first job offer after graduating from one of our full-time programs.

Mark Rodriguez manages the Placements team, including those Career Coaches, for our 24-week immersive bootcamp. Learn more about his job, the role he plays in our graduates’ success, and what his advice is for the next generation of students:

Mark, can you tell us who you are and what you do here at App Academy?

I’m the Manager of the Placements team for our online students, so I manage the team that guides folks from the day they graduate all the way through until the day they sign an offer as software engineer at, hopefully, a company that they love!

So, yeah, that’s been my role for the past two years a little more than that now, and I love it. It’s great.

Super cool! So walk us through when a student graduates: How does it work with them getting assigned to a career coach and working with you more closely?

Just before graduation, every student is assigned a career coach. This is their primary point of contact. This is someone who will walk them through the process of preparing for interviews, applying for jobs, getting those final round interviews, negotiations, and what happens when you get an offer letter. That includes reading through contracts, making sure that salaries look good, and getting grads ready to start their job as a software engineer!

On top of having that individual coach guide you through your one-on-one needs, we also have all of our coaches provide hours of workshops, continuing education, computer science fundamentals, interview prep skills, and stress management skills — that’s a huge part of it, too. You know, the job search can be difficult, so we make sure that everyone is taken care of in that way, as well.

So, in addition to meeting with your coach, you have all the coaches (myself included) available to walk you through the process. If there are individual needs that a student needs or that a job seeker needs, they can come to one of our workshops and get that support there, as well.

So you mentioned stress management being a large part of finding that perfect first job. We have actually two different types of career coaches. Some are more on the behavioral side and others more are on the technical side. Can you kind of walk us through the differences there and how you wind up being on one side or the other?

You know, the job search process really is kind of two-pronged in tech.

One is there are obviously the technical skills that you need, but you also have the behavioral part. Can you speak about tech in way that makes sense? You’re going to be meeting with people who may not be technical but are gonna be asking you questions much more along the lines of what you’d expect.

For anyone who is coming into App Academy from a different career, you would expect this type of sit-down interview where you would speak with a hiring manager about what the role is. Meanwhile, they’re trying to get an idea of whether or not you’re an overall good fit for the role in every other way but technically, so our behavioral coaches are experts in that side of things.

They have either worked in education, life coaching, career coaching, or they’ve worked in admissions at universities or in career opportunity or career placements in other fields and have found their way to us. They’ve done this for years and are fantastic at getting you or getting a job seeker set for that stage of the interview.

But then our technical career coaches come in and help guide you through the technical aspects of the interview. So that includes any coding challenges (like pieces of code that you have to write on your own then submit back to an interviewer for them to review) or for on-sites where you code live in front of, perhaps, the team that you’re gonna be working with. Something like that.

All of our technical career coaches are software engineers, again myself included, and that’s what we do, that’s what we love, and so when we’re not coding, we’re spending our time guiding job seekers through that process because we’ve experienced it before.

We know it’s a tough process for sure, but it’s a lot of fun. You learn a lot, and the learning really doesn’t stop after kind of graduation because of all of these other things that you need to do to really gear up for that interview process.

How do you interact with students on a daily basis? Are you having one-on-one conversations or phone calls?

So, for the most part, when an individual or any student job seeker kind of needs support, our workshops provide opportunities for them to pop in and say, Hey