In my recent publication, aptly named “Everything You Need to Know to Get Your First Product Design Job,” I explored the myriad concerns, skills, experiences, tasks, and mindset one needs to successfully get their first product design job. The publication applies to new and experienced product designers alike and includes a section in which I discuss the value (or lack thereof) of design bootcamps. Unfortunately, that publication was also quite long (a 45-minute read!), and I believe an essential signal was lost amongst the noise: design bootcamps are an absolute waste of time and money.

To put it another way: design bootcamps are a scam.

Design bootcamps have been a hot topic for at least the past decade, and their popularity remains relatively stable largely due to the increasing popularity of coding bootcamps. Direct comparisons are often made between the two because coding bootcamps usually have measurable results, whereas design bootcamps typically do not. It’s easier to write articles about how valuable design bootcamps are by comparing them to another thing with “bootcamp” in the name, even though the gauge of being a good designer and being a good code-writer are entirely different. Coincidentally, these articles drumming up interest in design bootcamps are so often written by businesses who offer such services. Convenient!

Why are bootcamps a scam? Read on.

If you are starting in product design, the promise of a design bootcamp can be very attractive: compared to a larger University or Trade School, you pay relatively less money and come out the other end of the program with a certification that you are qualified to be a Product Designer (or UX Designer, or UX/UI Designer). Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the truth is less glittery.

Having personally received hundreds, if not thousands of resumes from purportedly-qualified product designers who just went to a design bootcamp I believe that many graduates of these programs are quite simply being fleeced. Here’s why:

Good design is largely rooted in good taste

From this point onward, you will see a lot of references to taste. By far, this is the biggest problem with design bootcamps: they cannot teach you good design taste.

It’s challenging to adequately describe good design taste in writing, but I think of it as a well-developed and justifiable point of view about what separates good design from bad design, built up through wisdom, experience, and great judgment.

The development of design taste cannot happen in 3 months or less. It takes years. An abstract formula to think about it: time + persistence × (opportunity × exposure) = Taste. In other words, one needs years to develop their design taste, a lot of persistence in doing so, and the opportunity and appropriate levels of exposure to good design work. Not everybody has all of that, and a bootcamp cannot cram that down your throat.

I explain “good taste” more thoroughly in this publication.

Bootcamps are too quick

Often dubbed as immersives or intensives, the design bootcamp will throw a ton of information at you in about 10–13 weeks. It’s challenging, nigh impossible, to truly develop design taste in that period unless you already came equipped with it.

A multi-year education at a well-respected design school tends to (anecdotally) have a higher success rate of drilling good taste into students, but even graduates of RISD aren’t guaranteed to be good designers. If one of the country’s top design schools can’t reliably churn out good designers after 4 years of training, what makes anyone think a 13-week bootcamp will?

Design Bootcamps exist to turn a quick profit

Bootcamps are in the business of enrolling as many candidates as possible for as much money as they can get away with. It’s a business, after all, but you cannot fault a business for trying to make money…unless it’s to the detriment of its customers—especially students looking to build a life and career for themselves. Of course, a similar argument can be made about colleges, but at minimum, a design college is more likely to vet an applicant’s capabilities before enrolling them, and a design college will also spend more time investing in that applicant.

These bootcamps are priced for a quick profit. Some design bootcamps go for $7,000, while others can cost close to $20,000! An average class size of 20 students can generate $400,000 every 13 weeks. That’s $1.6M a year out of just one class and one teacher. Most bootcamps have multiple teachers who teach multiple classes, meaning the profits for the business outweigh the costs.

This UXfolio article explains some of the costs (as of 2020) but fails to mention that bootcamps are a scam. Though to its credit, it does mention that most design bootcamp promotion online is driven by affiliate marketing and not in the best interests of the design industry.

Bootcamps focus on software skills, not the development of good taste

Bootcamps are largely focused on skill development and software proficiency, NOT the development of taste and thinking. Going to a bootcamp to learn about a software program (with that as your core goal) is a valid goal, but design bootcamps don’t market themselves that way. Think “Figma Bootcamp” or “Photoshop Bootcamp” — this is what a design bootcamp actually is, but instead of only promising software proficiency they promise to turn you into a real designer.

If your goal is to learn how to be a product designer, you will be massively underserved by bootcamps. Successful product design is perhaps only 25% about using the software. The remaining 75% is soft skills, well-developed taste, competent user empathy, an understanding of statistics and data, and much more. These are things you cannot cram into a 13-week course.

Design bootcamps are not coding bootcamps

A coding bootcamp is much more likely to land you a job than a design bootcamp, largely because coding is seen as a skill while good design is largely influenced by well-developed taste. Try doing a google search to determine the employment rate of design bootcamp graduates and you will A) find that the vast majority of results are marketing blog posts from bootcamp purveyors themselves or from websites that promote the general industry and B) find that nearly all of the posts are about coding bootcamps.

Comparing coding bootcamps to design bootcamps to imply a certain level of efficacy or success is an intentional misdirection.

Design bootcamps help you build a pretty (empty) portfolio

Having spoken to many graduates of bootcamps, anecdotally the biggest focus of their course is to create a few demo projects and then build a portfolio, using the projects as case studies. In building the projects you will be given a hypothetical scenario (e.g. design an app to help users schedule therapy appointments) and hand-held through the process of identifying your target audience, creating user personas, wireframing your ideas, testing these ideas (with fellow classmates), designing a high-fidelity design, and then prototyping it.

You’ll be told that these are just as good as real projects because you went through all the steps, just like professionals do. Then, you’ll compile these into a portfolio built on Squarespace or Wix and you’ll believe you’re ready to land a high-paying job in tech.

You aren’t ready.

A portfolio bulked up by hypothetical projects for nobody, with imaginary data and artificial user tests, driven by a box-checking exercise to imply you did the steps—this is a waste of time. Any experienced hiring manager will see the work and know it’s bullshit, and you’ll be unprepared to adequately explain the why behind every decision.

Final thoughts

Can some people go into a design bootcamp, develop a decent portfolio, and then land a job? Of course, it happens. Some people also win the lottery. But the people who have done this already have some design experience. Perhaps they have played with app design before, or they have been avid consumers of design RSS feeds. An individual with no exposure to product design who suddenly, on a whim, decides it sounds like a great career shift — this person is not likely to succeed in a design bootcamp and find a great job afterward. Naturally, inexperienced and naive designer-hopefuls are the prime target for design bootcamp programs.

If you do attend a design bootcamp, please temper your expectations. Your 13 weeks of bootcamp will not qualify you for Senior Product Designer roles at Meta. By all means, do apply to roles that you might feel underqualified for, but keep your expectations in check. If you’re lucky, you might bag an internship or an entry-level role. And for many, that’s more than enough. But for some, they may be surprised that the bootcamp didn’t pay off in the way they’d hoped. Be wary.