This is really great, and I wish this existed 6+ years ago while I was transitioning careers. I graduated from a "name brand" university with a Stats degree, but no relevant work experience, and no desire to pursue what most of my classmates were doing (actuarial exams, etc.)
I liked assembling computer hardware when I was younger so I ended up getting my A+ certification and started working in IT help desk, eventually doing more sysadmin work, but still felt pretty unfulfilled. I couldn't afford to take the time off a full-time job to do a bootcamp or something similar, and almost took a combined work/training gig (which would have been something like a 60% pay-cut for 2 years -- in retrospect, this was totally exploitative and a terrible offer, so I was right to be reluctant).
I told my then employer about the offer and leveraged it into a lateral move into their QA dept. After doing the job for a bit and learning the basics, I read online that people were automating the checks I was performing manually. I started spending as much time as I could (and several months of extremely late nights) learning how to code. Once I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, it was a gateway to new and better offers until I found myself doing regular old Software Engineering. I was lucky to be given some great opportunities and tenacious enough to lateral my way into the career I wanted (at past jobs I would spend a chunk of my time unsanctioned working on various software problems that the company had, only to turn around and say "look what I built, could you give me a job doing this full-time?") but had I not already been in a field where I was working with developers and with computers every day, it would have been 10x harder to make the lateral moves that I did.
Anyway, that's my nontrad story. I think the best time for me to have joined a program like this would have been at the moment where I was doing lots of webdev side-projects but no "real life" problem to solve using the theoretical skills I had gained. It worked out for me in the end, but something like this could have definitely made my circuitous path a lot more straightforward.
I liked assembling computer hardware when I was younger so I ended up getting my A+ certification and started working in IT help desk, eventually doing more sysadmin work, but still felt pretty unfulfilled. I couldn't afford to take the time off a full-time job to do a bootcamp or something similar, and almost took a combined work/training gig (which would have been something like a 60% pay-cut for 2 years -- in retrospect, this was totally exploitative and a terrible offer, so I was right to be reluctant).
I told my then employer about the offer and leveraged it into a lateral move into their QA dept. After doing the job for a bit and learning the basics, I read online that people were automating the checks I was performing manually. I started spending as much time as I could (and several months of extremely late nights) learning how to code. Once I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, it was a gateway to new and better offers until I found myself doing regular old Software Engineering. I was lucky to be given some great opportunities and tenacious enough to lateral my way into the career I wanted (at past jobs I would spend a chunk of my time unsanctioned working on various software problems that the company had, only to turn around and say "look what I built, could you give me a job doing this full-time?") but had I not already been in a field where I was working with developers and with computers every day, it would have been 10x harder to make the lateral moves that I did.
Anyway, that's my nontrad story. I think the best time for me to have joined a program like this would have been at the moment where I was doing lots of webdev side-projects but no "real life" problem to solve using the theoretical skills I had gained. It worked out for me in the end, but something like this could have definitely made my circuitous path a lot more straightforward.