Is education about employment?
But no. This is for people who want to change the profession of education for employment. And for those who work in the profession, education is a way to become cooler. No matter how strange it sounds, they come to study with us in order to be the best specialist. Six months ago, we conducted a survey of our students, then there were a little less than 2,500. We asked a simple question: why are you studying with us? And only 17% replied that their goal is a change of work. The vast majority of colleagues are studying for their own development, for pumping skills, they are interested in new things in their profession. This opinion is indirectly confirmed by employment figures: we organized thousands of interviews, and only 350 of our students decided to change jobs in all two and a half years of the project’s existence.
The second point in which we were mistaken is that we, in principle, can employ. But no. No educational center is a subject of the employment process. He can in no way affect him and the thousands of circumstances leading to a change of work. We have changed our strategy, and now we just recommend our students to companies, and companies to our students. In a sense, we have become media in the field of work in IT, but without obsession. We now have 68,000 clients (both those who are studying and those who have completed training or have not yet begun). This is approximately 12% of the entire Russian IT market. Plus, we have more than 300 companies that cooperate with us and place their vacancies with us. But even at this volume, we are unlikely to be able to say that we are engaged in employment. We just help people and companies meet, and we do it for free.
One course - one teacher?
When we started, we had a fantasy that in order to make a cool course, you just need to find a good practitioner who has extensive experience in production and convince him to take the course. And then the course itself is a transfer of its experience. I even had a metaphor on this score: "he saws the application during the day, and tells you about it in the evening." I was very far from reality. It turned out that the course is a complex organism that has a different structure depending on the subject area. It turned out that in addition to webinars (read lectures), there should also be practical classes (that is, seminars) and homework, as well as methodological materials and all that. It turned out that at the same time a team of teachers should work on the course, that there are good lecturers, and there are seminarians, and there are assistants who check homework. It turned out that they need to be taught, and it is necessary to teach in different ways. Finally, it turned out that looking for these people and selling them teaching is more difficult than looking for and inviting to the state.
As a result, we created our own school. Yes, we did a school of teachers, and we teach, we teach significantly more than remains with us. The teaching profession is complex, energy-consuming, and only one in four, having completed our training, “goes out” to the audience. We did not find a better way to select teachers, except by immersing them in the learning process. For a month or two studies, future teachers have to not only create their own course, but also teach their classmates in practical classes. During the existence of the project, we taught 650 people to teach, 155 of them teach our students.
We will not have many courses?
Actually, how many topics are there in IT for training? Well Java, C ++, Python, JS. What else? Linux, PostrgreSQL, Highload. Another DevOps, separately you can automated testing. And everything seems to be. We counted on this number of courses and on the fact that we will have 20-40 people in the group. Life has made its own adjustments. So far we have done 65 courses, or as we call, products. And we plan to double in a year and a half. Once a month we launch 4-6 new ones, “feeling” the demand for technologies, programming languages and tools. It's funny, but so far we have not managed to understand why some courses take off, while others do not. We went the same way as with the school of teachers: we create a funnel and test demand “in battle”. And along with this, we grew up well in terms of group collection estimates: our largest group so far is 76 people, but we often collect 50 or more students. Of course, not everyone attends all classes, but we give the opportunity to watch them in the notes.
Recently, we "broke" the mark of 1,000 people. That is, at the same time we are teaching more than 1,000 students, conducting in peak up to 25 lessons per day. All this activity lives on our platform, which we have been developing ourselves since the creation of the project. Now a team of five is working on it, which is openly sewn up under requests for new and new functionality. We traditionally devote a lot of attention to the quality of training; we regularly gather feedback from students. Over the past year, we drastically “tightened” our grades, and now the average grade for a lesson is 4.48 on a five-point scale (against 3.99 a year ago).
What, then, was I not mistaken? Probably in the main idea of the project. We still invite those who already have experience in the profession to study. We are still doing entrance testing so that those who don’t pull the training first prepare for the course. We still invite only practitioners who don’t pour water, but say specific and useful things. We still focus on practice, projects, products and in every way we can develop the community around us. Two and a half years ago, I could not believe that someone would buy from us course after course, but now it is a fact: 482 people (that is, about 13% of all students) bought from us more than one course, the record holder here is a person who visited them as many as 11 pieces. We also do not guarantee employment, we do not promise to “learn the profession in two weeks,” we do not seduce mythical salaries. And we are very pleased that here on Habré, there are already more than 12,000 of you with us. Thank you and stay in touch.