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Pritzker cites Galesburg native and local coding school in inaugural address

Jamie Gladfelter, a Galesburg native now living in Chicago was pretty surprised when he was mentioned by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in his first address as Illinois’ 43 Executive Officer.

He says when he was watching the speech at home and Pritzker named checked Gladfelter and Main Street Codes in Galesburg.

He says was “surprising to say the least.”

“I was a little taken back. I wasn’t quite sure if I was hearing correctly and then after a few seconds I was able to process it, that indeed he did just say my name,” Gladfelter says.

Pritzker stopped by Main Street Codes for about 15 minutes in December on the Galesburg stop of his “thank you” tour.

Gladfelter said Pritzker asked questions about their operation, seemed impressed and expressed his support.

Gov. Prtizker was a heavy investor in tech startups before he entered government.

They design a curriculum with the expectation that students will have little or no coding knowledge.

Main Street Codes next 12-week class starts on Feb. 25.

Students will learn to build a dynamic database server website by the end of the class.
Tuition is $2,000 but Gladfelter says they hope to receive some donations to lower the price.

Anyone interested should go to mainstreetcodes.com and click on courses.
Gladfelter says there is a strong demand for people who have digital literacy in the job market, and coding bootcamps, like Main Street Codes, have been popping up a result of that demand.

“You have these employers that want to build digital products but there’s not the labor force that has the skills necessary to build them and so over the last six or seven years coding bootcamps have emerged as a way to get people scaled up quickly,” Gladfelter says.

He says after finishing a boot camp a student can be pretty close to “employable”, in careers like web development.

He insists anyone can learn these skills if they want to, particularly if they enjoy solving challenging problems.

 

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