Full Stack Track

This is an intensive course that will definitely require work in your own time. It's tiring but worth it. Make the most of each weekend to get plenty of rest...

It focuses on what businesses look for - practical hands on experience that's relevant to employment. The skills learned build on each other so projects get gradually more advanced during the course. It's great to be able to look back over what we built and see the dramatic advancement.

I couldn't have asked for more supportive and patient trainers. Very encouraging of questions and taking the time to make sure everyone has a good understanding of each topic.

I particularly liked the alternating approach of a week of theory followed by a week of putting it into practice working on a project. The projects really helped me identify things I didn't yet understand fully from the previous week, and embedded the theory more firmly.

I am very impressed with such a well chosen group of students - varied skills and interests but all very capable and all worked really well together. I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with them, and we're likely to meet up and collaborate on one off Saturday projects in future. The excellent judgement in choosing students stands out as one of the most important aspects to me.

The knowledge and experience gained (particularly working as part of a team) gave me much increased confidence which really helped in applying for a job.

If you're wondering whether this is for you, this is what I would say based on my personal experience: Given enough time, it's perfectly possible to learn software development by teaching yourself at home, but learning with feedback from someone who knows what is important is so much faster and will avoid years studying things you just don't need. Also, half the knowledge is how to develop software effectively with a team in person, which you don't get from learning at home. I also learned just how much more can be done with a deadline to work to...

Such a great course, I really enjoyed my time learning at the academy with great trainers and lovely students. I developed valuable skills both technical and for working in a team. It has given me a really strong base of skills to launch from and an idea of how I could learn and develop more in the future.

It is a very well supported intensive course that will give you all the skills you need to go straight into a junior developer role. The trainers are encouraging, friendly and always willing to help you learn.

Really great trainers, appreciative of how to cater to different learning styles. Great at teaching structured content and practical exercises.

I really enjoyed the Node and Framework’s module because it contained so much content that was completely new to me and was exciting even if it was difficult.

Having left school at 18 and wanting to persue a career in software development, I knew university was not the best option. Mayden Academy has fast tracked my career and helped me get a job that I wouldn't have been able to get without a degree, 3 years faster and far cheaper than University could.

The most valuable things I learnt were, project estimations / planning, teamwork, many new technologies and above all the industry standard way of doing things.

If you want the quick review here it is: By attending the academy I now have a job as a software engineer. 

I cannot recommend the academy enough- all learning styles are accomodated, the content is well thought out and the teaching was clear and efficient. I attempted to learn this stuff on my own before the academy and I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, not knowing where to start, what to learn and constantly getting stuck and having no one to ask. Attending the academy 9-5 Monday to Friday and treating my learning as a job really helped focus my mind, immerse myself in the topic and be part of a positive learning environment with others that had the same goal. It also stopped me being lured in by my Xbox at home when trying to teach myself!

Before joining Mayden, I had been an office administrator for around 20 years. 

It wasn't fun. It wasn't well paid. Most of all, it was depressing. 

I wanted a job career that I enjoyed - I wanted to be happy about getting out of bed and going to work in the morning. 

Mayden offered the opportunity to achieve this - I didn't have the time left in my working life to study at OU. I didn't have the financial stability to drop out and go to Uni for 3 years. I needed a quicker solution. Enter Mike and the Mayden team...

The course was great. Tough, but great - the content is current and constantly evolving to be relevant and most of all, backed up by practical work - as Scrum teams on big, full stack projects for real World experience. Invaluable for a new portfolio of work!

It will be a long, tiring and mentally challenging four months, and you'll have to be prepared to put in the hours outside of the classroom, but it will be worth it. 

Mike and the Mayden team have been as helpful as they can be in finding a job after graduating and in the other alumni from the course, I have a support network of people in the same situation, with the same experience. 

Give it a try. You won't be disappointed...

Why I chose this course: I dropped out of school without A-levels because I didn't think it could provide any more value to my future. I wanted to learn relevant job skills, fast, so that I could crack on with life and get a job I love. I wanted to be challenged, taught a lot to a high standard, with support for the "I don't get this at all" moments.
The company that set up the Academy have very high internal standards and started Mayden Academy because they and the UK more developers, with the hope that the graduates would be as good as, or better than, the computer science university graduates that they employ as entry-level developers.
Having met the instructors (real, current developers, not someone with theoretical or outdated knowledge) and discussed the pace of learning and the reasoning behind the course content I knew I would be set in good stead for a career from this course. After all, it was as important to Mayden Academy that I be a good developer as it is to me.

What the experience was like:
- Conten and Delivery: As well as how to build and structure things, the content included knowledge on current best practices, why things work the way they do, a history of the internet and each of the languages as we covered them, brief introductions to old practices we might come across in the future and why we no longer use them, specialist guest lectures and discussions on modern tools we weren't using in the course (for lack of time or need). Mike gave balanced overviews of each topic and taught us how to figure things out on our own, too.
- Tools: A special mention goes to the fact that all the tools provided were very good, we learnt to use them very effectively for a fast, personalised workflow.
- Pace and Support: At one point Mike rewrote an entire lesson for us overnight when we didn't get it the first time. He always offered extra support on an individual or team level and continually responded to any feedback we gave him. He also helped me revise for our ZCE exam, gave us all advice when we acted as scrum masters, gave us career advice and at one point helped me solve with some interpersonal issues. Additionally the other developers in the building were always willing to help, they even helped us discover what we loved by teaching us more about their jobs. The nature of the scrum team also meant that we supported each other, we all wanted to help each other move towards our goal of becoming an excellent developer.
- Atmosphere: We had been working in our team in the same way the developer teams around us worked, producing real work that was being submitted to the real world. I grew really close to my team and made great friends with the developers in the building. We came out feeling like software developers.

What I got out of it: In writing? I'm a certified scrum master and a zend certified engineer, which helps demonstrate the standard of my education. The experience I've gained in not just writing code but being a software developer shows through in the technical decisions I make and how I approach new problems, this has been invaluable in interviews. 
I'm now a scrum-master-slash-developer, I currently work in Typescript using the OOP structures I learnt on PHP. I keep learning every day and I'm a valuable resource to my company, providing robust applications and informed opinions.

TL;DR: I'm now a successful developer and scrum master, working effectively in a different language to the one I trained in, using the knowledge from the course daily. I loved the course, every minute of it, it was incredibly valuable to me. But I did get turned down from my first interview for being overqualified... 

As somebody with an academic background, but negligible experience with software, Mayden Academy was just what I needed.

The course provided me with the ability to write code in HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and SQL in order to create interactive web applications. As well as these core technologies, we were taught many peripheral components of the development process, such as Git, making us far more than code-writing machines. This was done in an environment where questions were absolutely always welcomed, and answered thoughtfully; and if the answer wasn't known, then other's would be consulted until it was!

The learning took place in an active development environment, with the academy students forming an additional Scrum team. Doing it this way enabled us to prepare for what is ahead of us in our careers and to take examples from people who are doing it already.

I had an excellent experience at Mayden Academy and would heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to jump start a career in software development. 

The course is equally divided between theoretical learning and practical projects, so that you get a good mix of real development experience, working as a scrum team to write entire applications to requirements and deadlines, along with a strong theoretical background to programming which can be transferred to other languages. 

The curriculum is really relevant and engaging, and the academy instructor and guest lecturers tailor their teaching to your learning style, so it's also a very dynamic program. After trying to self-teach various programming languages over the last few years and struggling to get further than the very basics, I found that being taught in person by instructors with a wealth of experience is the best way to learn, and it definitely helps that everyone is really friendly!

You'll learn more in 16 weeks than you'll imagine is possible, and meet some amazing people along the way!