Curriculum Spotlight: The Value of Learning React in Today’s Tech Market

As of January 2025, bootcamp students will be learning React instead of Vue.

Our Tech Elevator curriculum team routinely analyzes the skills and use cases they see in the evolving tech job market to ensure that our coding bootcamp curriculum matches what hiring managers are looking for in software developers.

Because of that, as of January 2025, all Tech Elevator cohorts will be taught React instead of Vue. React is a popular JavaScript library for building interactive user interfaces for web and mobile apps. It offers several benefits in software development, including:

  • Market Demand: React is popular, which means higher demand on the job market and more opportunities for developers who are skilled in using it.
  • Industry Adoption: With backing from Meta and a large open-source community, knowing how to use React means access to a rich ecosystem of resources, libraries, tools, and support.
  • Scalability & Flexibility: React helps developers work on large web applications, with customizable tools and structures. It’s useful to learn React in a coding bootcamp environment because of this flexibility. The options are aplenty, so guidance helps students understand how to get the most out of using React for all types of projects.

To dig into the topic a bit more, we recently caught up with Zubair Desai, Principal Engineer at Tech Elevator and one of the leading curriculum designers on our team.

Why make the switch from Vue to React? 

Zubair: We’re always looking for ways to make our graduates even more hireable, and constantly iterating and adjusting to improve outcomes. When looking at our data from hiring managers and engineering teams, we see that they’re looking for people to come in with some React knowledge, even more so than in the past. A while ago, maybe a team that was working with React just looked for candidates with general JavaScript skills. Now, they’ve gotten more specific about what they want, and that’s because so many places are now entrenched with React.

How popular is React?

Zubair: While both React and Vue frameworks are powerful and capable of creating production-grade applications, there’s no denying that React is far more prevalent in the industry than Vue. This is evident in our internal surveys and data, but I can also point to publicly available data including a recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey that shows about 41% of developers did work in React versus 16% in Vue.

What technical advantages does learning React offer students? 

Zubair: I would argue that it’s more of a social and business advantage. More people are familiar with React. React is open-source – meaning you can use it without any fees – and it was developed and is currently maintained with Meta’s vast resources. They spend a significant amount of time with React, fixing and releasing updates, and using it in their own products.

How did you handle this change from a curriculum standpoint? 

Zubair: As with everything, we’re looking at the specific skills and use cases our future alumni will encounter in both their job-seeking and careers. We research and identify what they will need to know to succeed, and we regularly design and update the curriculum to ensure our learners obtain hands-on fluency in building relevant and realistic projects.

Finally, whenever we introduce content changes, it’s important to make sure the student experience is smooth and stress-free, so we do a lot of testing and piloting with our incredible alumni network.

Ready to start learning React and more?

Explore our full-time and part-time coding bootcamps, which prepare you for the tech job market with in-demand technical skills, valuable soft skills, and job preparation through our Pathway Program.