Top Takeaways from the Tech Elevator Alumni Survey
For the last four years, we’ve been surveying Tech Elevator Alumni – we’re always so excited to learn how they are progressing in their careers and we use their feedback to build our understanding of the career landscape for technologists and inform how we change and adapt the program moving forward.
The annual report encompasses alumni from our physical campuses and locations – Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Dallas and our National Live Remote Program regardless of their employment status.
This year’s survey had a record-breaking number of responses and robust hiring partner representation.
Our Alumni Respondents
This report is derived from Tech Elevator alumni responses from all campus locations and cohort years, including our National Live Remote program. The survey returned a 32 percent response rate among the 2,581 surveys sent. Respondents were located in 35 of the 50 United States.
Our Alumni Network goes from strength to strength!
The Tech Elevator alumni network is growing exponentially, reaching new cities and communities across North America. The 2022 Tech Elevator Alumni survey had twice the number of hiring partners represented than the 2021 survey, jumping to 360 hiring partners represented through our alumni. The three largest hiring partners represented in the survey were PNC Financial Services, JPMorgan Chase and Progressive Insurance.
Our alumni report also shows that our alumni are continuing to work in remote and hybrid roles. We see a shift in remote versus in-person work with around half of our respondents working fully remote.
Graduate Salaries Continue to Climb
This year’s Alumni Status Report showed dramatic leaps in our alumni’s salaries after Tech Elevator.
On average, our graduates experienced a 10 percent increase in salary each year from 2016 to 2022 and the average time to promotion after graduates’ first roles was 1.8 years. We also found that Tech Elevator’s female graduates are out-earning our male graduates by almost $3,500 annually.
Beyond salary, our graduates are reaping the rewards of starting new careers in the tech space while being a part of the ever-growing community at Tech Elevator. We hope to continue to host alumni events and networking opportunities to keep our current and past students engaged and feeling supported as they continue their journeys in tech.
Alumni Support & Satisfaction
One new aspect of this year’s Alumni Survey was the creation of our Alumni Scholarship Fund, which awarded one scholarship from our Represent Tech candidates to a student in our September 2022 Cohort. This was only made possible through the efforts of our incredible alumni community as they reached a record-breaking number of survey responses.
Tech Elevator also received a Net Promoter Score of 81, which is a metric used in customer experience programs to measure the loyalty of customers to a company. We are immensely proud of this score. Not only because it was an excellent score, but because it was awarded by our alumni and reflects a loyalty that we’ve worked hard to uphold and earn. It’s fun to note that two of the best-known brands in continuing education, Harvard Business School and Wharton, scored 41 and 51 respectively!
Alumni referrals make up a large number of Tech Elevators incoming students – and that’s reflected in the fact that 90 percent of our respondents would recommend Tech Elevator to a friend, family member or colleague.
What Programming Languages Are Graduates Using?
Our role is to equip our graduates with the skills they need to break into the tech industry and be successful in their first job. According to Tech Elevator alumni, they feel that Tech Elevator has been successful with this commitment – Over 88 percent of our graduates felt prepared for their initial role after graduating from Tech Elevator. While it’s our job to lay the foundational skills, we also see it as our responsibility to teach our students how to learn and inspire them to keep learning – it’s so exciting to see the broad array of technologies our Alumni are using in their current roles as well as draw insights for how we may modify our curriculum to keep it relevant to the industry.
Alumni: We AppreciaTE you!
Thank you to our alumni for your input and for your continued support of the Tech Elevator program. It’s an honor and a privilege to have played a role in helping you fulfill your career potential. We are so proud to see you thriving in your careers and love hearing directly from you about the ways in which your lives have improved following the program. For all of us at Tech Elevator – your success is literally the fuel that keeps this hard-working engine running. We can’t wait to hear all the incredible things you achieve in the future as leaders in the tech community. Please be on the lookout for future networking and engagement opportunities from our new Director of Alumni Relations and we’ll look forward to seeing you!
View the Full 2022 Alumni Survey Report Here