For all the education and college debt that American millennials have accumulated, a recent study showed they are less prepared for the technology-driven work world than their global peers.
Annie Lin, regional director of General Assembly Chicago, says this gap helped drive the New York-based coding school to open here in November 2014 amid a surge in such programs. It offers courses in coding, marketing and user-experience design. By July, the Chicago location had graduated 125 full-time students.
She explains the skills that employers value most and how traditional education is falling behind.
Q. What are your most popular courses?
A. Our Web development and user experience, or UX, offerings are always really popular. And we’re seeing a large amount of interest — especially in Chicago — in product management-related workshops and courses.
It’s a rapidly increasing skill for people to have, and there are not a lot of ways for them to get trained. Product-management positions are more where people find themselves in it. They may not have gone through formal training, or they’ve transitioned from a different role and want a bit more training or they’re hoping to get into the field.
Q. Don’t MBA programs offer product-management training?
A. A product manager really needs to understand not only financial modeling but also a little bit of UX design and how to work with developers and UX designers. They need to know how to assess market fit for the product and minimum viable product. Our product-management courses take people through the product lifecycle from beginning to end. Some of that overlaps with MBA schools, but a lot of that isn’t necessarily covered in your traditional MBA programs.
Q. What industries here are fueling course demand?
A. Certainly your typical tech-industry companies as well as startups. We’re also seeing a lot of the creative and advertising and media agencies. We are getting a lot of demand from companies more focused on data analytics, like your large retailers and finance, meaning banking, accounting and investments.
For example, in March at SXSW, McDonald’s signed
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a partnership with General Assembly to do corporate training. McDonald’s will give some of its employees a monthly stipend and time off work to take our educational offerings. It’s a pilot program for McDonald’s, and it’s a different training than our typical format.Q. What are the 21st century skills and qualities most in demand from Chicago employers?
A. We know that JavaScript is a technical language and an ecosystem that’s growing really fast and has a rapidly increasing number of jobs in demand for that. Ruby on Rails was invented in Chicago, so there are still a lot of startups that have that skill set.
In UX design and Web development, we think it’s even more important that people might learn to pick up new things on their own. Learning to learn is a very important metagoal in all of our courses.
Grit is really important and something that employers appreciate as well.
Q. Howard Tullman?, CEO at 1871, and others argue that college is a waste of time. What about the polish and professionalism that comes from a four-year education?
A. Even in our more technical or Web development courses, there is a fairly strong focus on skills such as presentation skills. There are a lot of teamwork-related things, especially on the project management side. You still need to know how to present and do public speaking and how to collaborate and manage projects.
Q. How did your earlier jobs with Uber, Wikimedia Foundation, Apple and Ideo shape your thinking about tech careers?
A. From my days at the Wikimedia Foundation all the way through my career so far and absolutely what I’m doing at GA, it’s incredibly clear to me that we are not giving people the training that they need to succeed in the current job markets in traditional schooling systems. This was very clear to me from Wikimedia when I was hiring there. Folks coming out of the schools didn’t have the skill sets that we were looking for.
The educational program I was running at Wikimedia was so popular with professors at universities and colleges because the educators felt that traditional classes were not teaching their students the research and problem-solving skills and the ability to defend arguments with someone who disagrees with you. They started working with Wikimedia because there are a lot of benefits to having your students edit articles in this very public, unique space.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
Kate MacArthur is a freelance writer.