Eleven Fifty Academy - Fishers, Indiana

MTVExtreme

I am very satisfied with Eleven Fifty Academy. I took a 12-week Course here back in 2017 shortly after they moved to Launch Fishers and Immediately after completing the course I was able to get a 10-week paid Internship with the company followed up by a full time software job at my current place of employment just simply due to the skills I was taught at the academy. Eleven Fifty did a great job in teaching me the skills and technology needed in today's world to help me get started in a great career field.

Cameron Houser

Eleven Fifty Academy (EFA) was perfect for me. As a career changer their on the spot training helped me prepare and get a job in the tech field. Everything they did, whether it was the personality analysis, Local experts as guest instructors, and the career placement assistance was fantastic and helped prepare and land the job I have now. My first paycheck was 100% larger then the last one I had pulled. It was worth the short amount of time and money, I recommend this school to anyone who is interested in jumping in the programming world.

My background was in higher Ed and I am convinced that spending the few weeks in tacking a programming class will prepare any Computer Science major to be a star student.

Philip Smith

I recently finished a 12-Week course from Eleven Fifty Academy and I had an amazing experience. Through the help of career services I was able to secure a job as a junior developer before I even graduated. I highly recommend anyone who is thinking of switching their careers to tech to look into Eleven Fifty Academy. It has helped me grow in confidence and I am excited to begin my career.

Lydia Moody

I was able to successfully career change in less than a year by attending Eleven Fifty Academy. I began their Javascript program Dec 2018 and had an offer at a top tech company in Indianapolis in August of 2019. EFA can be a stepping stone for someone like me who had no prior experience in development or it can be a place to expand your knowledge for those who already have learned a language but need to improve their skills or add a new language to their knowledge base. And I can't finish this without including that you get amazing lunches every day included in your tuition!

Cody Hunt

Eleven Fifty Academy helped change my life and career path! I went into their 12 week JavaScript cohort where in the short time I learned everything I needed to change my career from Sales to a Web Developer. Shortly after completing the course I found a job that was paying me double what I was making at my previous job. If you're thinking about making a change into a career that is more stimulating and will last into the future I highly recommend going here

Merideth Bush

I highly recommend this school to anyone looking for an alternative to college or a career change! I am very glad I made the choice to come to Eleven Fifty Academy... it truly did turn my career around in the best way possible. Anyone who is willing to put in hours of hard work both to learn and to find a job can see a lot of success at this school. Read on to learn the details of my excellent experience, and what I think EFA can do to continue to improve as a school and earn a full 5-star rating. (UPDATE: Due to changes detailed below, I have upped my rating to 5 stars.)

After I graduated grad school with an MBA and an MA in International Policy Studies, it took me 6 months to find a job in my field of study. My pay was so low that I had to move back in with my parents, and I had no benefits.

I went to Eleven Fifty looking for a quick, affordable career change, with a high financial payoff, and boy did I find it. Like I said, it took me 6 months to get a single job offer with 2 graduate degrees. I had received 3 job offers within a week of graduating from Eleven fifty 3 month .NET cohort in October 2018. My income nearly doubled, and I now have full benefits as well!

I absolutely loved badges 1 and 2 of my .NET program. The instructors and TA's were fantastic, the projects were educational and fun, and even though the classes moved quickly, the instructors and TAs were always willing to sit down and help you if you were struggling. I always felt welcome to ask questions and learn more.

Badge 3 was a little anti-climactic. Badge 3 is a group project, and we had 2 very strong coders on my team who kind of took over the project and didn't leave much for the newer coders like myself to do. It made the end of the program easy, but it also meant I didn't really learn anything in the last 3 weeks of the course. Obviously I was there to learn, so that was disappointing for me.

I give the Eleven Fifty 4 stars because of its outstanding teaching staff and the excellent results that I came away with. However, even the best of schools have room for improvement. Here are some suggestions I have for EFA:

1) Cement the curriculum for each cohort before the class begins. One of the great things about EFA is that they are constantly changing the curriculum to keep up with what is relevant in the tech community. This gives its graduates an excellent competitive advantage when looking for jobs, but the downside is that pivoting focus once the cohort has started can be disorienting for the students and even the teachers. At the end of my cohort, my instructor realized there were several important topics we hadn't covered, and started rushing trying to get all of the information in.

2) UPDATE: I originally encouraged the school to be transparent about the career support they can and cannot offer, but I see that this information has already been updated on their website. As a result, I have upped their rating to 5 stars. Thank you, EFA!
ORIGINAL: Even in a booming tech city like Indianapolis EFA students will need to take initiative to find jobs. I had a very positive relationship with the career services team, and found a lot of their advice very helpful in my career search. That being said, I think that the availability of internships and business partnerships was overstated on the EFA website at the time I joined the school in July 2018. I spoke to career services about this before I left, and they assured me it would be addressed.

Overall, the great strength and the great weakness of EFA is that it is constantly changing and evolving its programs to make their course offerings as relevant as possible. This can be wonderful for the students, but the downside is the risk that school may pivot a little too quickly and can't quite get its feet under itself before a new cohort begins.

My experience was overall very positive, and I highly recommend this school to someone looking for an alternative to college or a career change. I plan on returning in the future to study in the new Cyber Security program!

Willie Travis

PROS
- Seamless enrollment process
- Incredibly helpful instructors and support team
- Coursework offered a good balance of lecture time and heads down coding time.

CONS
- Course content had a decent flow, but during our final project we had to design with Angular which had never been covered in class.
- Friday workshops were hit and miss; some guest speakers were dynamic and engaging, others not so much.

I was a student in March 2019 in the full-time .NET cohort. Before enrolling, I attended the free intro to coding course offered at EFA. I felt no pressure to enroll and was encouraged that they acknowledged that coding wasn't for everyone and effectively screened their potential students.

We were given pre-work to complete prior to our cohort starting which really let you hit the ground running when the class started. The class moved at a quick pace and throughout the twelve weeks, our class size went from 18 to 12 students.

The important piece of Eleven Fifty Academy is the career services team, as a large majority of students are there to prepare them for a job in tech. One important thing to note is that EFA does not have a direct pipeline to any employers, so you're not guaranteed a job after graduating. Expect to hustle, network and keep working to hone your skills post graduation to land your first job. Their career services team will be there to support you every step of the way with resume building tools and tips, advice on networking on LinkedIn and sending you job opportunities as they become available.

Overall, I had a great experience at EFA. I met some great people and fell in love with the EFA's supportive culture. Coding isn't for everybody and don't expect it to be easy but if you're willing to put in the work in the classroom and be diligent with self-study it can help you make the jump into technology.

Benjamin J

I took a course teaching iOS app development using Swift back when Eleven Fifty was just starting (Fall 2014). I'm sure they have changed and improved a lot in the past six years, but I will speak a bit about my experience. The philosophy is very much about immersive coding. The days were long hours of learning and working on code projects, but at the end of the week, I felt my aptitude was at another level.

It's been six years since I've taken that class. I haven't done much with mobile development, but I was able to apply the learning philosophy to learn Python and C++ effectively and efficiently in the same way that Eleven Fifty taught with swift. To speak to the power of this learning approach, I start at one of the "Big Four" tech companies next week! I am very grateful for the opportunities that have opened up with programming, and attribute much of that success to Eleven Fifty and their immersion philosophy.