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Comment by fourstar | Hacker News Reader

> ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment.

No it won't.

> By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the jobs of today.

Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know:

HTML and CSS Javascript jQuery Github

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I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering, and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.

Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online.

I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're interested in.

Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.

I suggest starting with something like an Arduino robot kit.

I'd say the closest things would be actual honest-to-goodness academic courses online, e.g Coursera/MIT/etc computer science tracks.

This is actually where I started, with MIT's intro OCW. I began to worry, though, that I would be better served learning something directly relevant to the job market, and so half-way in I moved onto The Odin Project. My plan as it stands is to first get a grasp of web development so I can have a solid chance of getting a job after graduation, but I intend to go through a lot of MOOCs once I'm done with TOP. I've got a year and 2/3rds until graduation, which will hopefully let me learn a fair bit.

jlees has a good suggestion. I wanted to add Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all). For example, the course 'Artificial Intelligence for Robotics' (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373) may be what you're looking for. I don't know your current skill level for programming nor understanding of mathematics (stats and probability) and computer science, but the course can be self-paced, which can make it great for presenting a concept and allowing you time to dive into the material, especially supporting foundational material. There are also other lower level courses. Good luck with your studies!

Taking stats ATM; I've got the AI /w robots one marked down in my list of MOOCs, though I've put it at the bottom as I think I've got to cover a lot more 'fundamentals' first. Thanks for the heads up though.

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