4 Tips on How to Prepare for a Coding Bootcamp Assessment

As a prospective applicant at any coding bootcamp, you’ll likely need to complete a coding bootcamp assessment. Few if any coding bootcamps admit students without completion of one.

While these coding bootcamp assessments vary program to program, the ways to prepare are relevant no matter which program you wind up choosing.

Here are four foolproof ways to prepare and ensure admittance to the coding bootcamp of your choice.

4 prep tips you’ll want to know for your next coding bootcamp assessment

Get your hands on any course-specific practice problems or pre-work.

If you try to go into a coding bootcamp assessment or interview cold or without any practice, you probably won’t fare well. Coding is like riding a bike; if you give up on it for a while, you will have to re-learn or get re-comfortable with certain parts of it.

Most programs will provide you with their own practice problems or work you can complete beforehand to get more comfortable with the problems they want you to solve. For example, at App Academy, our practice problems include Boolean Algebra among others.

We highly recommend completing these exercises even if you’re already a veteran coder or have experience. If you’re a beginner, this pre-work will be a good indication of your future success in a coding bootcamp program.

Find any free coding courses, YouTube lessons, or practice problems.

Once you know what the coding bootcamp assessment will cover, we highly recommend finding additional practice problems outside of any provided to you from the program. YouTube, Discord, or a simple Google search will unlock countless hours of free and affordable coding tutorials around particular languages, functions, or sequences.

Not only is this critical to developing specific skills you’ll be tested on, but part of becoming a tech professional is learning how to teach yourself new skills. Applying the languages and lessons you’ll be tested on to more use cases will be critical in your comprehensive understanding of the subject matter you’ll be tested on.

Get comfortable with explaining your work.

Writing code is just one part of a coding bootcamp assessment. Even more important is your explanation of your work and how you came to a conclusion. This will be especially important in the real world when you’re an engineer, a developer, or an analyst on a team with others and you’re solving business decisions.

This also shows your critical thinking skills and tells an admissions specialist at the program you’re hoping to join how you think and work best. There’s no right or wrong way to work — in fact, a diverse cohort of different people who learn differently is the best way for students to develop new skills and relationships.

Ask for feedback.

Whether you earn admittance to the coding bootcamp of your choice or not, asking for feedback is imperative. This will set you up to ask for and give feedback in a work environment.

It’s a great learning experience to hear what the admissions team thinks of your presentation work and coding capabilities. Learning where your strengths lie and finding ways to improve the not-as-strong facets of your pitch will be wildly helpful in the future.

Conclusion

App Academy’s Bootcamp Prep courses are guaranteed to help you gain admittance to any of the top coding bootcamps. In fact, we’re so confident in our live or self-paced prep courses, you’ll get your money back if you’re not admitted.

You can also apply your deposit for our Bootcamp Prep courses to any of App Academy’s full-time or part-time course tuition.

Start an application now to learn more about our Bootcamp Prep options and 10-year anniversary special.