Questions people ask before they commit a year
Eligibility, cost, time, matching, placement, accessibility and data. If your question is not here, the contact form reaches a person, not a queue.
Ask us anything — including the awkward questions
Nobody should commit a year of evenings on the strength of a brochure. The answers below are the ones we give in person, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.
If the question you have is not here, write to us. The contact form reaches the programme team directly and replies come from a person.
For mentees
Anyone from adolescence onward who is serious about building a career in technology. We run tracks for teenagers exploring the field, for adults entering the workforce for the first time, and for professionals pivoting from another industry. There is no degree requirement and no entrance exam — the application asks about your goals, your available hours and what you have already tried to learn on your own.
Core mentorship and the education platform are free to accepted mentees. Where a track needs hardware, exam vouchers or cloud credits, BTMP covers them through partner funding. We also offer stipends to remove the barriers that most often end a promising cohort — unreliable internet access and the absence of a working machine.
Plan for six to ten hours a week: roughly four hours of self-paced coursework, a two-hour small group lab, and a one-hour mentor session every other week. Tracks run twelve to twenty-four weeks depending on discipline. Everything is recorded, so a missed session is recoverable.
Tell the programme team. Re-matching is a normal outcome, not a failure — roughly one pair in eight re-matches after the first quarterly review. We ask both people for written feedback, adjust the matching criteria, and restart with a fresh development plan.
No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. What Pipelines guarantees is a verified skills gap report, at least six rehearsed interview loops, negotiation coaching, and warm introductions to partner engineering teams that have open requisitions. The hiring decision stays with the employer.
For mentors and partners
Two hours a month of scheduled session time, plus asynchronous review of your mentee's work. Before your first session you complete a short mentor training module on feedback, sponsorship and boundaries. Most mentors renew for a second year; the commitment is deliberately small enough to keep.
Yes, in three ways: sponsoring a cohort, hosting mentees inside your engineering teams, or running the organisational training programme for your managers. Most partners start with the training and move to hosting once their mentor bench is certified.
No. The education platform, mentorship matching and Shipyards phases all run remotely and we match across timezones. Hardware loans and in-person lab access are currently limited to the United States; everything else is global.
Practical matters
A machine capable of running a modern browser and a code editor, and an internet connection stable enough for a video call. If you do not have both, say so on the application — the hardware loan pool and connectivity stipend exist precisely for that.
Small group labs and speaker sessions are recorded and captioned. One-to-one mentor sessions are never recorded; what happens in them stays between the pair and, in summary form, the quarterly review.
Four numbers, published annually: completion rate by track, placement rate twelve months after graduation, mentor renewal rate, and Shipyards phase progression. We also publish the ones that look bad, because a programme that only reports its wins cannot be held to account.
Yes — roughly half of our mentees do. Evening-weighted cohorts exist for exactly this, and mentor sessions are scheduled around your availability, not ours.
Captioned recordings, transcripts, extended assessment windows, screen-reader-tested platform materials and adjustable session formats. Tell us what you need on the application or write to [email protected] at any point.
Applications are stored for the duration of your involvement plus twenty-four months, and are never sold. The full detail, including your rights and how to exercise them, is in the Privacy Policy.
Still have a question?
Write to us. Replies come from the programme team, usually within two working days.