HOW CAN ANYONE GUARENTEE ME A JOB AT THE END OF 2 YEARS OR 4 YEARS OF COLLEGE AFTER SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY FOR EDUCATION?

Hi Renee,

Congratulations on making it to the half-century mark!

As someone with an equal number of tree rings, I think you touched on the most important part of your qualifications. Your knowledge of how the world works and your common sense. Tech is just like any other business in some ways - it needs customers and a product that people want and will pay for. Over the last five years or so the biggest changes I've seen aren't about the "what" that is being created but rather about the "how". Thinking and practice around ensuring that you get the right product to market has changed the "how" considerably, largely in the area of methodology. It used to be that software projects were scaled to annual releases, with a big bang (often using a process called Waterfall) for the latest release with all the great new features. The pace of change within the environment those products work within, however, have changed dramatically as development teams started adopting a methodology called "Scrum", "Agile" or "Lean Engineering". This focus on the development process deeply impacted not just how software is now developed, but also how teams that support and/or enable that technology respond. Working in short "sprints" to produce specific functionality and iterating, scrum/agile/lean has altered forever the landscape of the people that drive projects.

One of the most important aspects of this change to methodology is that it has started to permeate all parts of our culture and society. Knowledge and common sense are absolutely essential in being able to understand what is happening in the fast paced agile environment as it is an iterative process, each piece building on the previous work and drive improvements through sprint retrospective sessions. You don't have to be an engineer to be a valuable member of an agile team. You have to understand the value of the thing (to many stakeholders) that is being produced and you have to help the team be successful.

The other great thing about this shift is that it is absolutely applicable and can be practiced in nearly any environment - the home, the community, work, church - wherever there is collaborative work being done the principals will apply. Here's a primer in case you are interested: http://labs.openviewpartners.com/scrum-for-non-technical-teams/

I hope that is helpful!

Unfortunately, I don't think there are educational programs that ensure a job in tech (if they did, I feel like that's a scam). Many code academy type bootcamps do guarantee partnerships with a few companies for bridging into a career, though!
And many prestigious universities have a very high employment rate after graduating with a degree, especially great engineering schools with computer science programs.

If tuition is a problem, I think that self-teaching is also a viable option in tech. If you can prove that you can create apps/websites with proper functionality, I think you can land a few freelance gigs. (Some of my classmates back in school did this before they got any full time job or degree!)