
Jordan Carlisle leads a session of Barcamp Little Rock 2014 at UALR. Barcamp is one of many tech resources now available in central Arkansas that is helping to boost the state's tech profile.
The Iron Yard coding school will launch in Little Rock this May, and it’s being hailed as a “game changer” for the state in the evolution of its budding tech startup ecosystem.
Classes start May 24, and while a location hasn’t been set, the school will open somewhere in downtown Little Rock. Plans are to secure a 6,000-SF space and offer three intensive, 12-week courses a year with 15 students, graduating 45 a year. Graduates should command a good salary. The average annual salary for software developers in the U.S. is just under $100,000, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics.
Iron Yard courses in Little Rock courses will teach:
- Front-end engineering, which will provide the skills to create fully functional websites and Web applications;
- Rails engineering, where students will learn how to build fast, production-quality full-stack apps;
- Mobile engineering, providing the skills to create iOS and Mac apps.
Tuition is $12,000 but scholarships and other financial assistance are available. The program currently operates in 15 cities across the country, and new cities launching with Little Rock in May are Las Vegas, Indianapolis and Nashville, Tennessee, with plans for further aggressive national expansion.
The Iron Yard school was launched in 2013 by Peter Barth as a way to retain startups graduating from his Iron Yard Ventures accelerator program in Greenville, South Carolina.
“If we wanted our portfolio companies to stay in Greenville, we had to fix the talent pipeline,” Barth said.
He knew that providing a homegrown pool of talent would help convince graduating startups to remain upstate.
Little Rock had been on the Iron Yard radar, Barth said, but Gravity Ventures co-founder and serial startup founder Kristian Andersen of Conway introduced him to Innovate Arkansas, and expansion to Arkansas was accelerated.
Andersen, a mentor to the ARK Challenge accelerator of Fayetteville and Little Rock and a consultant to IA, said developing local tech talent is the next step in the growth of the state’s tech startup ecosystem and believes the Iron Yard will serve as that “game changer.”
“The Iron Yard is the largest coding academy in the U.S. and arguably the most successful,” he said. “Getting it in Little Rock is a seminal moment for the state. The Iron Yard will fill huge gaps in Arkansas. We don’t have enough tech talent, and it will fill that need while creating lots of opportunity for upward mobility.”
Innovate Arkansas Director Tom Dalton said finding local coding talent has been a long-term issue for the state.
“The Iron Yard provides exactly what we need,” he said.
An environment now exists in Arkansas in which tech startup ventures can thrive; just a decade ago, that wasn’t the case. The ARK Challenge startup boot camp, launched in 2012 through the efforts of Innovate Arkansas, has proven that startups from as far away as India can be attracted to Arkansas and successfully accelerated here, but providing them a deeper pool of local tech talent will help ensure long-term status as Arkansas-based ventures.
With the Iron Yard “get” and its already emerging tech startup scene, Little Rock is beginning to emerge as a true potential tech startup draw. The Little Rock Technology Park beginning to take shape along Main Street downtown, the growth of the EAST Initiative tech-based educational program based in Little Rock, and the state’s recent commitment to mandatory computer science in schools all are positive signs for the future of tech startups in the state.
Meanwhile, resource centers such as the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub and the Arkansas Venture Center are offering programs designed to assist and train local coders and developers. Last year, the AVC launched its monthly Code IT series, and the Hub recently announced the launch of the Little Rock chapter of the national 100 Girls of Code program. Successful Barcamp conferences focused on tech and web development have been held across the state, and the annual Made by Few tech conference from the Few agency has been heralded as an up-and-coming national event.
“The transformation in Arkansas has been pretty remarkable,” Andersen said.
In addition to helping supply talent for local tech startups, the Iron Yard serves to help staff local corporations, many of which reached out to Barth in Greenville about the need for more tech talent. He said Iron Yard schools have a 96 percent graduation rate and all graduates have found good jobs within three months.
The school recruits local developers to come aboard as full-time instructors, and local curriculum is tailored to specific needs in each community the school serves. Most of the Iron Yard team will be local when Little Rock classes launch in May, and ultimately 100 percent of the Little Rock team will be, Barth said.
The courses are intensive. Iron Yard students can expect to put in 60 hours a week, although short-term training classes are available as continuing education for large corporations. The courses attract young coders as well as tech-minded folks in midcareer jobs looking for a change, Barth said. In fact, a majority of Iron Yard students are midcareer. But a coding background is not necessary to attend an Iron Yard course.
Advisory boards of 10 to 15 members are established in each Iron Yard city, and Barth said the Little Rock board’s makeup likely would include representation from local corporations, organizations such as Innovate Arkansas, and agencies like Few.
Barth wants to expand the Iron Yard program to every city in the world with a population of more than 500,000. The next U.S. targets include Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Columbus and Cleveland, relatively big markets but a notch or two below the titans of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. That leaves a big opening for schools like the Iron Yard.
“Our competitors are only in places like New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco,” Barth said.
Barth was attracted to Arkansas by Andersen’s sales job, but once he arrived in the state, he knew expansion to Little Rock would be fast tracked. Northwest Arkansas reminds him of Greenville and upstate South Carolina, and Little Rock reminds him a lot of Columbia, the South Carolina state capital of similar size located roughly in the center of the state.
“Little Rock was on our list, but not on our list of the next four cities,” he said. “But once I got on the ground and saw everything that was going on with Innovate Arkansas, I was impressed. South Carolina has been a great fit for us, and visiting Little Rock was like coming home.”
Andersen looks at the Iron Yard as the topper to a decade of steady progress.
“Having a coding school like the Iron Yard here will help create more high-paying jobs, more wealth, more upward mobility and supercharge the growth of this tech startup ecosystem,” he said.
“The most successful startup ecosystems have some things in common. They are cool places to live, they have access to talent, and they have access to capital. Little Rock deserves a seat at the table when you talk about cities with those things.”