"Over time, General Assembly became less of a consumer facing business and transitioned into one that was serving primarily business clients — which means access to Adecco Group’s over 100,000 businesses is a big boon to the company’s continued expansion plans."
I thought this was interesting. Anyone know more about the services General Assembly was offering to businesses? I guess there is more money and less risk associated with this market. Going after the public / the bootcamp model means you run into accreditation laws surrounding educational institutions and you have to do more work (e.g. tracking placement rates).
I know Booz Allen Hamilton launched a company-wide initiative with General Assembly for a data science course [1]. From my limited understanding of the content, I believe it is aimed at providing a very rudimentary introduction to the field for the more businessy/consultant types. And to demonstrate that BAH is "data-driven".
I support this - it's money that's not going to the military. Every government contract signed, every middle manager given a raise, signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who would bomb and are not armed, those who would kill and have no weapons.
One thing they do is serve as a recruiting agency as well. I was an instructor there for awhile and that was part of the business. But that was back in circa 2012 and I wasn’t exposed much to their actual sales/b2b efforts.
GA is a great org — they also did a lot of (job training) work with returning military vets as well. GA has gotten a lot of people into the tech world. Their courses aren’t all-encompassing, but their web dev courses are good enough to get junior devs off to a good start. I wish I had them when I got started! Their current Project Management courses look pretty solid as well. Highly recommended (but I have an admitted bias of course.)
I worked for a company that was running a pilot with them for a few years to train internal candidates who wanted to go into Software Engineering, almost as a way to
1) outsource employee development
2) satisfy the need to hire lots of devs faster than recruiting could hire them
3) bring down the cost of hiring devs overall.
I left before seeing the results of the pilot, but I remember folks saying that it definitely opened up doors to those looking to switch careers, but that it's a slow process: it takes a lot of time and practice to get to even an entry level engineering position, especially when it's a part-time course.
Overall I like the idea of democratizing education and lowering the barrier people who want to get into the industry; plus, it definitely seems like a solution to the supply/demand problem for devs for companies, so I expect the trend of bootcamp/business partnerships to continue.
Never underestimate that people just take the classes there and expense them. I signed up for GA in order to evaluate multiple classes on Design Thinking - not because I needed to learn that material from a class, but because I needed to prove I had taken a class to be eligible for an internal certificate within my company that qualified me to work on a certain kind of project. I ended up taking a different class (from codecademy), but GA was attractive because it was relatively inexpensive and the classes seemed to be pretty short, which would have helped.
My codecademy course in data analysis seems to be a lot more work, but also a lot more useful.
I am a cofounder at Hack Reactor. B2B is our fastest-growing business unit, and this is true for most bootcamps that do B2B. Mostly this is corp training that happens onsite. For example, Company X has 3000 desktop or Java engineers that need to learn JS/web/data science/whatever. GA (and a few others) also has a suite of non-classroom products, which you might see as closer to Lynda or Udacity.
I taught the web development immersive for a while. They offer private, on-site, tailored WDI cohorts to businesses. They've also built a cybersecurity course for a client, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I don't know about.
In New York, at least, it was not accredited but it was...registered, I guess? with the state. I had to get a teachers' license.
It seems super-valuable for something like GA to get pulled into a classic vocational-training style setup. Adecco seems very well suited to place a large number of entry-level programmers, including on the receiving side, to help business structure teams around getting value out of such employees.
I took their product management course as part of our corporate development. I felt that GA did a very good job in highlighting frameworks and methodologies that made me a sufficiently better product manager to justify the investment.
I thought this was interesting. Anyone know more about the services General Assembly was offering to businesses? I guess there is more money and less risk associated with this market. Going after the public / the bootcamp model means you run into accreditation laws surrounding educational institutions and you have to do more work (e.g. tracking placement rates).