Learn how to build web apps with JavaScript, one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Develop in-demand skills, including creating dynamic web applications with React and Node.js, working with APIs, and incorporating third-party frameworks and libraries.
Gain the skills and knowledge to become a Full Stack Developer and meet the growing demand for professionals who can develop and maintain web applications. This project-oriented course teaches you how to code websites from scratch, and you'll build a portfolio of working web applications to showcase to potential employers.
Learn front-end development with HTML & CSS, JavaScript, and React, and back-end development with Python, Django, and Node.js. Get 1-on-1 mentoring and a structured curriculum to become a skilled Software Engineer or Full Stack Developer.
Learn JavaScript programming essentials for creating web applications, including variables, conditional logic, functions, DOM manipulation, arrays, loops, async events, APIs, and OOP. This hands-on course aims to prepare students for work on practical web design projects.
Learn how to build dynamic web applications with React in this comprehensive bootcamp. From the basics of React and Node.js to advanced components and server deployment, you'll gain the skills necessary to create fully-functioning web apps.
Learn how to make your webpages more dynamic and engaging with JavaScript and animations using GreenSock. From the fundamentals of JavaScript code to creating stunning animations with GSAP, this course will equip you with the skills to transform your web projects into complex, interactive designs.
In 1995, Brendan Eich, a developer at Netscape, created JavaScript to address the growing demand for interactive web pages that emerged in the early 1990s. At the time, websites were largely static, and developers sought a lightweight scripting language to make them more dynamic. JavaScript quickly gained popularity in the late 1990s, prompting ECMA to standardize the language.
Over the years, JavaScript has evolved through multiple iterations, introducing new features and capabilities. Today, it is widely used for both client-side and server-side web development. A thriving ecosystem of frameworks and libraries highlights the active community that has helped cement JavaScript’s central role in modern web development. Web browsers like Google Chrome and Safari come with built-in support for JavaScript, running code through a JavaScript engine that users can enable or disable. This combination of standardization and accessibility has contributed significantly to JavaScript’s widespread adoption.
Given its ubiquity, flexibility, and simplicity, you can do a great deal with JavaScript once you’ve learned how to use it. Its applications range from the humble sign-in screen to no less an agency than NASA, which built technology to keep astronauts safe on spacewalks using the language.
Intergalactic adventures aside, JavaScript’s chief purpose remains the creation of dynamic and responsive webpages. Along with HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets), JavaScript is one of the fundamental building blocks of just about every page on the World Wide Web, with “just about” used in the sense of a whopping 98.3%.
Thanks primarily to Node, JavaScript is no longer shackled to your web browser. A wide variety of libraries, including jQuery and Express.js, exists to provide ready-built clumps of JavaScript code, so as to spare developers from having to build applications from scratch. Node was originally a back-end technology, but has since expanded beyond its initial purpose, and is used today for front as well as back-end development, thus making it possible to construct a full-stack application using just JavaScript. That’s not bad for something that began life as a scripting language, and is a testament, not only to Brendan Eich’s abilities in creating the language in ten days, but to the ingenuity of the developers who subsequently saw the potential in JavaScript, and made it into the most popular of programming languages today. Some 63.3% of developers worldwide currently use the language. Compare that number to the 49.3% of developers who use Python, and the comparatively scant 30.5% who use Java.
A thorough introductory JavaScript course will very likely take you from deploying the language to create websites to using it for full-stack development. The former will involve using JavaScript together with the web’s other two Lego bricks, HTML and CSS. As for the latter, you can expand upon JavaScript and Node in several ways, perhaps the best-known of which is the so-called MERN stack. MERN is an acronym for MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node, the four technologies that allow JavaScript to be used to create entire applications. There are other approaches to that, including the MEAN stack (no, it’s not nasty; it just replaces React with Angular, another technology for client-side development) and the MEVN stack (which replaces React with and yet another client-side development library, Vue.js), but MERN is the one most frequently taught. On top of all that, you’ll pick up some valuable and marketable soft skills along your journey, too.
At the very beginning of the web (again, back when humans were eating dinosaurs for supper), HTML came into existence and created a uniform standard for getting text and images to display in a web browser. It was the work of Computer Scientist Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, KBE, and OM, a signal honor he received in 2007 from Queen Elizabeth II, basically because, if anyone invented the internet, Berners-Lee did. HTML is generally the first computer language people learn, and it is generally a prerequisite for JavaScript classes. JavaScript was designed to be used together with HTML to make webpages dynamic, active, and generally engaging. Today, the third ingredient in creating a webpage is CSS, cascading style sheets, which was part of Microsoft’s ordnance during the First Browser War. Essentially, HTML puts a webpage together, CSS styles it, and JavaScript brings it to life. That’s almost certainly going to be the first use of JavaScript you’ll learn. It will give you a chance to be exposed to JavaScript commands and syntax, and such things as variables, if-else statements, callbacks, and array and string methods. You’ll also learn about APIs (application programming interfaces), the things that make it possible for applications to communicate with each other, and be introduced to JavaScript’s libraries, beginning with the elementary jQuery.
Although the last letter in the MERN stack acronym is N for Node, Node is actually the sine qua non for the remainder of the stack. It’s a complete programming environment that radically changed the course of JavaScript’s evolution when it first appeared in 2009. Node’s primary function is to allow for the construction of server-side applications using an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use language that was designed for something else. Among the topics you’ll study will be synchronous and asynchronous JavaScript using Node (JavaScript was initially designed to execute commands in order; asynchronous JavaScript allows for commands to execute in the background without disturbing the page being viewed by the user), and the use of the Node Package Manager (npm), which is a repository of packages of code that can be used to develop just about anything (there are 800,000 packages to choose from) using JavaScript.
As its name suggests, Express, the E of the MERN stack, is a framework that greatly expedites the creation of APIs and web applications. Where Node goes, Express is reasonably sure to follow. Examples of how Express can be used are to be found with IBM, Uber, and Fox Sports Australia. Express calls itself unopinionated and minimalist, which means that there is no single right way to do something with Express. It also means that Express helps create designs that use the fewest hardware and software resources possible, and that it won’t get in Node’s way.
Whereas Node and Express are primarily back-end technologies that can be used to develop the server-side of your full-stack masterpiece, the R in MERN is there to help with the client-side. It’s a library of components for the creation of user interfaces. In other words, React provides you with a selection of blocks of ready-made code that you only have to plug into your program without needing to reinvent the wheel. You don’t even need to build your whole page with React; you can integrate React components into your HTML document. Although open-source, React is one of several software projects curated by Meta. (Angular, the MEAN stack’s replacement for React, was created by Google. The only way to escape Big Tech here is to use Vue to build your interfaces and single-page apps, as it continues to operate under the aegis of its creator, Evan You.)
Nearly every full-stack application is going to involve a database, be it a list of customers, inventory items, orders, or whatever else you need to keep organized. There are fundamentally two types of databases: relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL). The former type stores data on templates with predetermined fields that need to be filled in for each person or item. The latter is a great deal more flexible and stores data in folders without fields. NoSQL is currently experiencing a wave of popularity, and MongoDB is one such technology. Designed not only to work with JavaScript (it can also accommodate Python, Java, Ruby, C, C++, and a few others), Mongo is the database component of the MERN stack, and allows you to integrate a database into your full-stack application.
That’s already a lot of tangible skills to learn. However, while you’re struggling with JavaScript and the MERN stack, you’ll also develop new soft skills. Leading that particular pack is logical thinking. It involves solving problems using logical, inductive, and deductive thinking. Computers are nothing if not logical, and, while learning to talk to them won’t turn you into Mr. Spock overnight, it will at least teach you how to draw rigorous conclusions from the information you have. That goes hand-in-hand with another soft skill people like to see on your resume: problem-solving. Programming is nothing but an exercise in solving problems: the reason for creating an app is to solve a problem that you’ve been able to perceive. Both of these fit under the rubric of disciplined thinking, which is perhaps the best way to sum up the soft skills you’ll acquire from your work with JavaScript.
In the overall scheme of programming languages, JavaScript is generally considered one of the easier languages to start with. The learning curve isn’t difficult to navigate, and JavaScript is a high-level language, meaning that its syntax bears a certain resemblance to human languages. That doesn’t mean you can type your commands in English, but it does mean that you’re not going to be awash in symbols and totally arcane expressions as would be the case if you were learning a middle-level language like C. (The lowest-level language of all is binary code with its 1s and 0s, and it’s the only language your computer really speaks. All programming languages are a compromise between binary code and human tongues.) You’ll also have to factor in the difference between being able to use the language to build some straightforward projects and being an expert who can supervise a vast team of people building the next Google Maps (which employs JavaScript extensively).
By some degree of consensus, the most challenging JavaScript concept is asynchronous programming. Although it can be explained in 17 words—it’s programming that can run in the background while something else is going on for the user—getting from that definition to making it happen on your computer is rather a journey. Traditionally, this kind of programming employed a JavaScript function named callbacks (as in “I’ll call you back when the cake is ready to come out of the oven.”) The problem is that you can very quickly accumulate callbacks-within-callbacks-within-callbacks which can result in what’s sometimes called callback hell, or a pyramid of doom, because the increasingly indented lines of code resemble the Great Pyramid of Giza. Suffice it to say that, if programmers invented those names, writing your first asynchronous code is going to cause you some grief, even with the development of newer coding techniques that at least spare you having to debug a pyramid of doom.
YouTube has videos claiming to teach JavaScript in five minutes. Despite that, you should have realized (having read thus far) that you’re not going to learn how to use the language even to do as little as print out “hello, world!” in less time than it takes to soft-boil a ramen egg. On the other hand, learning JavaScript isn’t going to require a lifetime of unabating toil, either. The amount of effort you put into the task is going to affect how long it takes you to gain a functional knowledge of JavaScript that’s equivalent to a conversational knowledge of a human language without knowing how to conjugate irregular verbs or master the dative case. That can be put at something like a few months of working at it every day. Full fluency in JavaScript, equivalent to the ability to express abstract philosophical concepts in a foreign language (irregular verbs, dative case, and all), will take quite a bit longer than that, as one of the things that leads to that kind of fluency is experience using the language. In terms of the crucial question of how long you need to study JavaScript to be a viable proposition on the job market, that can take anywhere from three to nine months, depending on how hard you work at it, how quick a study you are, and how good you are at grasping how the language can be applied to solving problems.
There are three fates, three stars in Orion’s belt, and three teaching modalities available to anyone wishing to learn anything in the age of the internet. The first remains the one that you experienced when you started going to school: a live teacher in the same room as you and the other kids. That’s undoubtedly the most familiar learning scenario you know, and is very likely the one you’ll think of first after you decide that you want to investigate classes in JavaScript. You’re going to discover that there aren’t as many of this type of class as you may have expected, but Chicago is a large enough market to have at least some live in-person JavaScript course offerings.
The current trend is towards online learning. Online classes are divisible into two categories: live and self-paced. The live online class is basically the same thing as a live in-person class, only you’re not in the same room as the teacher, although you do share the same moment in time. There will be other students participating in the class with you, and you’ll still get the teacher’s attention and ask questions. Your instructor will even be able to connect to your screen and help you out (with your permission). Online classes actually have advantages over live in-person ones, perhaps the most attractive of which is that you don’t have to face the L at rush hour to get to class. You can go (or, even more attractively, stay) home, take your shoes off, and sit in a comfortable chair while you attend class. You’ll also be free from the inevitable distractions of a public classroom, which include everything from headache-inducing fluorescent lighting to students texting under the table, assuming you don’t get distracted by home-life interruptions.
The third teaching methodology at your disposal is the self-paced online class. Also known as asynchronous learning (in this case, that means that you’re not taking the class at the same point in time as the teacher; it has nothing to do with JavaScript programming itself), it consists of video tutorials you view when you can. The convenience is unparalleled, and may be the only choice that works for you if you’re a busy person trying to hold down a job and take care of a family while learning JavaScript. Some asynchronous classes do include direct contact with advisors, mentors, or instructors, which will give you a chance to ask questions when something fails to make sense to you, but that’s not the rule. Self-paced learning has further drawbacks, the most critical of which is that pre-recorded video tutorials don’t evolve with the technological Zeitgeist, whereas live classes can always take in the latest developments in JavaScript programming.
Without question, the most crucial complementary skill for programming in JavaScript is mastery of HTML and CSS. Moreover, you definitely should learn HTML and CSS first. In fact, most introductory JavaScript classes make knowledge of both languages a mandatory prerequisite, and the better you are at them, the better the webpages you design will be.
A more advanced complementary skill for JavaScript Developers is knowing how to use version control management systems like Git or GitHub. These are used on a daily basis by programmers in the workforce and are an essential tool for team collaboration. Using Git isn’t rocket science, so you can probably pick it up in short measure, and it’ll look good on your resume.
You might also learn something about UI (user interface) design. Learning to build webpages with JavaScript means that you’ll be able to code them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that your work will be aesthetically appealing. Knowing something about the visual design side of creating a user interface will set you off from the pack of JavaScript Developers who often just follow the instructions from creatives. A little development of the imaginative side of your brain will also help to counterbalance all that left-brain stimulation you’ll be getting from your JavaScript course.
Chicago began its commercial life as a fur-trading outpost. The 18th century saw a steady European demand for beaver pelts that could be felted and turned into hats, and America provided an enormous supply of fur compared to the depleted supply in the Old World, where beavers became extinct in Great Britain in the 16th century. The American fur trade eventually ran into similar problems, but, in its heyday, it was a thriving industry and a driving force in westward expansion. Although high-end hats such as Stetsons are still made of beaver, Stetson still uses antique equipment to process pelts into felt, so they don’t need much JavaScript to produce some of America’s finest hats. On the other hand, Stetson has a fairly elaborate website, so even they use JavaScript after all.
Fast-forward to 1833, when Chicago’s fur trade effectively became extinct, and what had been a trading post on Lake Michigan became the third most important city in the United States. Chicago is home to well over thirty Fortune 500 companies, including such wide-ranging concerns as Walgreens, McDonald’s, and John Deere. It’s the country’s leading center for food manufacturing, home to the third-largest stock exchange in the country, the biggest commodities exchange in the world, and a wealth of banking and insurance companies. What’s perhaps less well-known is that Chicago has progressed from beaver pelts to high tech, and today the city is an important destination for startups in search of funding. Finally, Chicago is home to a substantial charitable and not-for-profit sector.
Chicago gave the world an alternative to thin-crust pizza, hot dogs with mustard, relish, onions, tomato, peppers, and celery salt, and came up with the idea of combining cheese and caramel popcorn. Perhaps it can be less gastronomically proud of having introduced the company that would introduce the Chicken McNugget to the world. (In all fairness, McNuggets weren’t on the menu at McDonald’s Store #1, which only offered hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, and beverages, including milkshake machines that worked.) Today, Chicago is the country’s food processing and innovation capital.
Due to its location in the heart of America’s breadbasket and its links to the rest of the country by a highly developed transportation network, Chicago has been in the food processing business since the 19th century. What once meant meatpacking now means high-tech food innovation and the venture capital to go with it. Among the new spheres of research and development to be found in contemporary Chicago are alternative protein sources, performance-maximizing foods, specialty pet food, grocery and meal delivery platforms, and restaurant tech, including robotics and AI ordering systems at McDonald’s that will perhaps spare a human from having to inform you that the ice cream machine is out of commission.
How does JavaScript fit into turning fungi into vegan veggie burgers or developing sustainable packaging for new foodstuffs? All this novelty requires computers: innovation today can’t take place without software development, and that’s more likely than not to involve JavaScript. Web design is vital for food producers as more and more ordering goes online, while the full-stack development potential of JavaScript can be used to create software that can bring non-GMO, vegan, organic, green Thai curry in a renewable box to Americans’ doorsteps.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is the largest organization of its kind in the world. First launched in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, it started out life as an agricultural commodities exchange. It became CME Group in 2007, when it merged with the Chicago Board of Trade, an even more venerable financial institution that introduced futures trading to the world. (A futures contract is a promise to purchase a commodity—traditionally agricultural products such as pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice—at a future date, with the intention to sell the contract before having to take delivery of 15,000 pounds of orange juice solids. Your assumption is that the contract will be worth more than you paid for it when you sell it. If that sounds like gambling, that’s because it is, although there’s more to it than just the random spin of a roulette wheel.) CME Group is also the holding company for Commodity Exchange, Inc., and the New York Mercantile Exchange, making it the world leader in derivatives trading of all kinds.
Futures trading has changed radically in the 21st century. They don’t even trade pork bellies anymore, having replaced them with lean hogs, which are live pigs rather than the bacon-yielding bellies of slaughtered ones. What would astonish a member of the Chicago Board of Trade of a hundred years ago is that agricultural contracts now take a back seat to far more elaborate instruments (even frozen concentrated orange juice is now traded on the InterContinental Exchange, based in Atlanta). While soybeans, nonfat dry milk, and those lean hog futures are still traded on the CME, the exchange also handles futures for equity indexes, energy, metals (not only precious ones), interest rates, cryptocurrency (just Bitcoin and Ether for the time being), and, believe it or not, even the weather.
From this, you can infer that CME is at the forefront of the intersection of finance and technology, i.e., what’s known as FinTech. And CME is only the tip of the Chicago finance iceberg, home as the city is to the Chicago Stock Exchange, major banks such as Northern Trust and BMO Bank, and insurance companies including Allstate. JavaScript is a central element in FinTech development, both because of its near-universality in web development (which makes it ideal for creating websites and apps) and because of its ability to create cross-platform applications without having to start mobile and desktop versions of the same thing from scratch. Among the JavaScript-powered FinTech apps in wide use are PayPal, the commission-free stock trading platform Robinhood, and the leading cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Coinbase.
FinTech isn’t the only aspect of technological innovation that can be seen thriving in the Windy City. Despite its roots in old-school finance, Chicago today is also a thriving tech hub, with plenty of incubators and accelerators to draw startups to Chi-town and away from places like Silicon Valley. The city is committed to its economic development and revitalization, and offers a variety of incentive programs to businesses of all sizes and types. Chicago provides the highest return on venture capital in the country, and, in 2023, the city’s businesses raised nearly $6 billion in venture funding. As a further attraction, office rental space in Chicago is far less expensive than it is in New York or San Francisco.
All of which goes to say that tech is thriving in Chicago, where you can work for a tech giant such as Google, Amazon, or IBM, find employment with startups in all phases of their development, or take a job with one of many independent software companies. JavaScript is obviously an essential ingredient in this rapidly expanding sector. Of course, the more programming languages you know, the better, but a great deal of software is being developed using only JavaScript. If your goal is to work in software development, Chicago offers plenty of opportunities as well as substantial room for growth.
Once you get past the pizza and the celery-seed-studded hot dogs at Wrigley Field, Chicago is a city that is not immune to social inequities and is home to several underserved populations. The good news is that it’s also a highly charitable city, ranked 12th in the country, with a total of $6.1 million in charitable contributions coming from 36.5% of its citizens, based on their 2020 tax returns. The city government helps to support this extensive network of not-for-profit organizations, which, in turn, have done a great deal to help the city’s underserved populations. Notable Chicago nonprofits include Urban Initiatives (which seeks to empower youth through sports and play), the Center on Halsted (the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ center), and Chicago Cares (which organizes volunteers to meet the city’s greatest needs).
All these organizations depend heavily on websites to raise funds and spread the word about their activities, and that’s where JavaScript is most likely to come into play in Chicago’s nonprofit sector. Web development probably factors less into the picture, although there certainly is always a need for good apps that can serve the not-for-profit sector and, thus, the community at large. Among the apps serving not-for-profit organizations built with JavaScript are Givesource, Crisis Text Line, and Track it Forward.
A solid grounding in JavaScript prepares you, primarily and most obviously, for a career as a JavaScript Developer. The job comes in various guises, and the titles and specific responsibilities vary from job to job. Given the versatility of the language, JavaScript Developers can find themselves working on the front or back ends of apps, as well as in JavaScript’s natural habitat, web development.
This is the category under which the Bureau of Labor Statistics classes most of the functions associated with JavaScript Developers. Those include developing and implementing websites, evaluating code, and optimizing website performance. For the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin area, salaries for Web Developers tend to run in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, which stacks up well against the national median wage of roughly $78,000 for the sector.
The BLS bundles several JavaScript positions under this category; the difference from Web Developers is that Web and Digital Interface Designers concentrate on design rather than technical execution. UI Designers fall into this category, as UI is most certainly a JavaScript-adjacent skill. Salaries for Web and Digital Interface Designers in Chicago center in the $70,000 to $75,000 range, which falls quite a bit short of the national median salary of approximately $83,000, let alone the national mean, which runs just north of $100,000.
Other job and salary sites break down job titles further than the BLS does. Indeed, for example, it has a category reserved just for JavaScript Developers. In Chicago, salaries for people working under that umbrella average out in the $90,000 to $95,000 range, which is in step with the national average. Generally, the responsibilities that are assigned to those working in this category are web, rather than full-stack, JavaScript. The language is more useful than that, of course, so when you’re looking for available positions, don’t forget to search for roles that involve back-end development using Node.
Another job title that involves no small amount of JavaScript responsibilities is Front End Developer, that is, people who develop the front ends of websites with which the user interacts. UX (user experience) and UI are adjacent fields that use JavaScript extensively, although other languages are regularly used by Front End Developers. According to Indeed, average Chicago salaries for Front End Developers generally fall in the $105,000 to $110,000 range, although outliers at either end are plentiful.
Among the online options at your disposal are several certificate programs and classes from New York City-based Noble Desktop. These begin with a JavaScript Development Certificate program, which goes into the subject matter in considerable depth. Lasting several months if taken full-time, this certificate program produces full-stack JavaScript developers who are adept at handling the MERN technologies. You’ll be expected to know HTML and CSS before beginning this course. In addition to the time you’ll spend with your instructor in class, Noble Desktop includes eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions. You can use these for anything from asking questions about material studied in class to preparing yourself for the job market. You’ll also receive a free retake option (good for one year) as well as access to recordings of classroom sessions, just in case you don’t catch something the first time through. Included as a bonus elective is Noble’s SQL Bootcamp, which will nicely round out your database knowledge after studying (the NoSQL) Mongo as part of the regular curriculum.
Noble Desktop has a briefer JavaScript offering that may be of interest to you if the certificate program seems a little more than you want on your plate at present. This would be the JavaScript Programming Bootcamp. It teaches JavaScript programming in the space of about a month (full-time) without proceeding to the MERN stack the way the certificate program does. The bootcamp would be a good choice if you are only going to need JavaScript, so you can work on websites. A single mentoring session is included with your tuition, as are the retake option and classroom recordings described above.
Have you lain awake at night and wished that your existing team were more conversant in JavaScript? You don’t need to have lost sleep over it, but there are a lot of things that can be done by a staff who’s capable of programming in JavaScript. You can save a lot of money by taking care of straightforward web development and maintenance operations in-house and have more control over the results. The language isn’t overly complicated to learn, and the odds are that, with the right type of instruction, your team members will pick up a highly useful skill in very little time.
Noble Desktop can offer you and your organization corporate JavaScript training that will have your team coding in the language in less time than you may imagine. Noble has three different ways of teaching your team: an online class that uses Zoom (or whichever teleconferencing platform you choose) and is custom-tailored to your team’s needs, wherever they may be working. Or, if your team is centralized in one location, Noble can dispatch one of its expert instructors to your premises. You can also arrange vouchers for your employees to attend one or more of Noble’s regularly scheduled public classes; discounts are to be had for multiple voucher purchases. Please don’t hesitate to contact Noble’s corporate sales department for additional particulars.
In the heart of the Midwest’s finance capital, there’s opportunity everywhere. From tech startups in Fulton Market to powerhouse Fortune 500 firms in the Loop, Chicago offers a virtually endless array of ways to level up your skills in tech, business, data, and design. The city thrives on bold ideas, making it the perfect place to grow a career that is not only lucrative but also makes a real impact. With expert instructors with decades of experience, you’ll learn more about the subjects you’re interested in, all while receiving hands-on training. These instructors live and breathe to explore and work within their field, meaning they don’t just teach; they mentor, guide, and connect you to the heart of Chicago’s many successful industries and direct you to the most meaningful path to help you achieve your goals.
Noble Desktop’s partner school, Practical Programming, has state-of-the-art facilities conveniently located in downtown Chicago’s iconic Hayworth Building at 29 E. Madison Street, Chicago, IL, 60602. It’s an easy-to-find location for students from across the city to attend. The campus is modern, equipped with the necessary tech and tools you may need, and provides resources like Wi-Fi, comfortable workstations, and expert instructors and staff ready to help you learn. Getting there is simple, whether you’re commuting from the Loop, River North, or surrounding areas. The school is easily accessible from the CTA trains and buses, with nearby stops for major lines like the Red, Blue, and Brown. If you’re driving, you can park nearby at various parking decks and metered spots within walking distance. The central location means you won’t have to stress about making it to class, and that your training sessions can fit into any schedule with ease.
JavaScript drives interactivity and functionality across modern web applications. Instructors at Noble Desktop have years of experience helping students understand core principles, giving them the foundation needed to build dynamic front-end features.
Henry Gonzalez is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 30 years of experience in the federal government, leading engineering, program management, and acquisition initiatives in naval warfare, air traffic management, and homeland security. A retired senior executive, Henry now serves as a part-time instructor in Chicago, where he teaches project and program management, leadership, and strategic planning to professionals of all kinds. He holds the highest level of federal certification one can hold for acquisition program management and systems engineering. In addition, Henry was part of the core team that updated the Project Management Institute’s Standard for Program Management. Henry is also a certified Balanced Scorecard Professional and holds a Bachelor of Science in Ocean Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, along with a dual Master of Science in Ocean Engineering and Ocean Systems Management from MIT.
Robert Simon is a highly accomplished financial management professional and educator with more than four decades of federal and private sector experience. As a Financial and Management Curricula Instructor at Graduate School USA since 2007, he teaches courses in financial management, federal travel regulations, and organizational leadership, both virtually and in person. Prior to his teaching career, he held senior roles at the General Services Administration, overseeing a six-state regional budget of approximately $100 million, and at the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Management Service, where he led national training initiatives on electronic banking. Robert’s background spans accounting, budgeting, and program analysis, holding certifications as a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Government Financial Manager.
Edward (Scott) Dillion is a seasoned financial expert with over three decades of experience in the Department of Defense, where he specialized in a range of financial management areas like budgeting and auditing, as well as performance-based management and cost analysis. He holds an MBA from Southern Illinois University and a B.A. in Business Administration from Grove City College. After retiring in 2014, Scott pivoted to a second career in education and consulting. He teaches project management and marketing at Graduate School USA and has also taught courses in federal budgeting. Additionally, Scott serves as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Management Concepts Inc., where he helps develop financial management course materials. He also has a lifetime membership with the American Society of Military Comptrollers, holds a Top Secret security clearance with the Department of Defense, and is a recognized Tier 2 instructor at Graduate School USA for his wealth of experience.