Have you ever been in school and caught yourself thinking: "When will I ever need to know this?" We've already made the choice not to accredit and one of the major reasons for making this decision was to have the freedom to change the curriculum as needed, so students aren't sitting in class trying to figure out why they're learning things that aren't relevant to their career. Here are four major advantages of having a dynamic, responsive curriculum:

1. Teaching the most up-to-date concepts and practices

Most traditional forms of schooling have a lengthy process when it comes to making changes to the curriculum due to institution size, structure, accreditation, and getting approval. While this can be great when it comes to quality control, maintaining tradition, and following regulation, this can become problematic when we're dealing with an industry as fast-paced and dynamic as the web development world.

SDG is able to update the curriculum on a cohort to cohort basis if needed. In the tech industry, what works today may not work tomorrow. You're faced with the choice of either changing or falling behind. We use our ability to update what we teach in order to best prepare our students, which leads to our next point...

2. Prepares students

Our overall goal is to teach our students to think like developers and empower students to be career ready. In order to be a successful developer and land their dream job, it's imperative to not only teach fundamental hard skills and tools that companies are looking for in candidates, but also prep them with soft skills.

The SDG team takes into account the feedback and opinions given by our current students and alumni to help make changes as we move forward with future cohorts. Student and alumni feedback continues to push us to make improvements in our career support, soft skills, and development lectures around anything from resources to make the job search smoother or diving further into a development concept.

3. Meets the demands of employers

After completing the program, graduates are looking to put their new developer skills to work. Having a strong community built with supportive hiring partnersallows us to directly see what companies are looking for when it comes to candidates' skills and building their web development team. Using that feedback can assure that we are teachingapplications and languages that arebeing used throughout the Tampa Bay area.

4. Balances freedom and responsibility

A dynamic curriculum allows more flexibility but, at the same time, requires additional attention and engagement from faculty to help shape and inspire student learning. Our team pays close attention to not only industry trends and community demands. The team must also measure the level of student interest, understanding, and stress through the program. Knowing all of that enables the team to continually improve the curriculum and push students to learn and grow as developers.