CareerFoundry

 

I passed the UX design course several months earlier than the deadline. I must say, I was looking for a course that would outline design phases and decisions, clear up and  bring into structure all that enourmous overwhelming information I saw in the web.  Lucky for me, I had a great mentor Allison Yaeger. Her critical thinking, down-to-earth attitude together with positive personality both challeneged me and encouraged me to revisit my decisions, iterate on my designs. 

Moreover I received great feedback on my portfolio, and recommendations on how to handle interviews and market myself. It helped me to land an Interaction Designer job in IceMobile, one of the best employers in the Netherlands.

I higly recommend the course with such a professional mentor to anyone, who wants to start UX career. 

CareerFoundry definitely helped me to grow in my technical skills as a designer.  Their course helped me to familiarize myself with common design tools that are used in the industry.  The various projects and student community was helpful to expand my skills and to gain feedback.  I enjoyed the mentorship CareerFoundry offered as well.  My mentor was always open and willing to talk and flexible with times.  She gave me great and helpful feedback and helped to challenge me in learning other tools and thinking about different ways to design. 

I'm almost finished with the UI design course and I can't emphasize enough how glad I am I took the leap and committed to a bootcamp. Here are some pros and cons: Pros: -The course is self paced. -The readings and assignments focus on real world application. Each task builds on the last and suddenly, viola, you've designed an app (actually several)! -My mentor was great. We connected through Skype and email and she was okay with it when at one point, life happened and I had to take several weeks off. I even asked her to be more critical of my work and she was! (That may sound silly but I really really want a design job and I thrive under a healthy amount of feedback!!) -My mentor also had me tailor my assignments to my larger projects. The result was that I often had to do a little more work but it also meant that I got a glimpse of real problems that come up in the design process and as a result, I feel more confident applying for jobs. -The job placement team! I've never had someone help me apply for jobs. So that's neat. Cons: -Now that I'm job hunting I see that most UI jobs require you to have some basic HTML/CSS/ or JavaScript knowledge. I wish this was covered in the course. I know that there are a lot of free resources out there for this but having a project to focus on and a mentor to call on would be helpful. -The job placement team can be a little hard to get ahold of. I have several working with me so I can usually get ahold of someone but getting ahold of the same one can take time.

Coming to CareerFoundry with prior UX design experience I thought it would help me take my UX skills to the next level.  

I feel my CareerFoundry tutor (Abhishek Bhattacharya) and mentor (Leah Simmons) did a fantastic job showing me where I excelled and what areas I could improve in. 

As most of the class material was not necessarily new to me, I really appreciated the enthusiasm demonstrated by Leah engaging me in critical discussions on how to realign my methods to better meet user needs.  She was high energy and generous with her time.  

 I found the class very easy and was able to complete it in a 3 month period while working a 50+ hour job.  

I would simply state that this program is not only great for newbies but individuals who might have been working in the field for a while and want to enhance their skills.   

I feel the CareerFoundry course was an excellent investment of my time and money!

I am still working through the course but I am enjoying it a lot. I like that we are immediately starting to learn things that are useful and applicable in building a web application, rather than starting from very basic and boring things, or outdated technologies, like it usually is in formal education like university. Also the community part is great, I can always ask for help my Mentor or my Tutor and also ask questions to other students. Sometimes it takes time for them to answer and in the meantime I find the answer by myself which is also great. I am looking forward to do more of backend stuff and to complete my portfolio.

For the most part, I enjoyed the Web Developer course. It was challenging at times -- mostly toward the end. The curriculum was decent. The part that really made this course stand out was/is the community of not only helpful alumni, but how students helped/help other students. Having that in a real-time environment was/is great. As an alumnus, I still help students whenever possible. Additionally, having both an assigned tutor and mentor was great. Mine were very helpful and offered great suggestions as well as being able to point me the right direction to resolve issues for which I just could not find the answers. Having that kind of support system really made the course less frustrating.

Although the course was good, there is definitely room for improvement. First of all, I would not recommend this course to a complete beginner. If you have even basic HTML and CSS knowledge, then go for it. However, if you only know HTML and CSS because you heard a geeky friend talk about it, then I would go elsewhere to learn the basics. I, and many others, have helped too many struggling and inexperienced students get through the first few lessons because they were confused about what they needed to do.

Secondly, I believe there should have been more practice with Javascript and an introduction to a newer framwork like Angular, React, or Node as opposed to jQuery. I say that because when I went job-hunting after the course, all of the job postings wanted experience in more, some several more, languages and/or frameworks and the three that I listed seem to be the most popular. Adding at least one of them to the course would give students something more in-demand to add to their resume and portfolio.

Thirdly, I don't think Ruby and Ruby on Rails are good choices for students to learn right now simply because most of the jobs out there want a lot of experience and most are for senior positions. Students are hoping to take the course and get in the field as fast as possible and I don't believe the short amount of time to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails is sufficient -- especially if the student has little to no programming experience.

Finally, there are parts of the course where the wording was just outright confusing. However, that is not all bad since the student has the ability to notify the staff and let them know about things like that, which they are pretty good about resolving quickly.

With all that said, I still had a good experience and made some friends and acquaintances. There is also the added benefit that the course lessons are still available even after you have graduated as well as continued access to the community. Also, they do offer resume assistance and try to help you find a job. Still, I believe with the right combination of web development languages and frameworks, more students may find positions as a web developer faster.

 

CF team has developed a great tool online, defiant most of the time and designed to increase difficulty lesson after lesson. System provide you a great feed back and a big picture of your progress.

Tutor and mentor system works good, answers comes fast enough (could be better) and in a clearly way. They use links to useful resources and some times use video answers, showing you where and how you can improve you work.

One of the most valuables things is the community (I did not take it as it should, to be honest) but allways you find useful info, support and a friendly network of people, a really important aspect of being web developer!

...that my course is over. I mean it. 

I did the Web Dev course and finished it in 2 1/2 month. That's pretty fast and although I hadn't much free time (let's say none) I definitely can say every minute was worth it. Here's why:

• Course content

Before I joined the course I did some free courses on codecademy which was great. At least most of the time. You get an exercise, write your code in the given editor and get your review right away. So far so good. BUT: Did you really learn something? I'm not sure about that. You don't have to install your own text editor. You don't have to install Ruby, Rails and so on. Yes, it might feel a lot easier but what for? I think, IF you really want to learn a language you have to fail and you have to read and google and make stackoverflow to your new facebook. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use free sources in addition. ;) 

I liked it a lot how the content of CareerFoundry is written. And whenever I thought something was wrong (like I didn't get an expected output) there's a review at the end of each task where you can submit your notes. I only used it once and they reached back to me nearly immediately. Plus there's a lot of advice where to find further information. All you have to do is to read and try. Sure though, in three months it can be really, really tough. But it can be done. 

• Mentor Video Reviews

The first review felt strange to me. Someone else - a human being I actually saw on my screen - went through my code and checked my assignment. That's even like sitting in school and the teacher corrects your work. Scary but oh so helpful. And I was really happy with my mentor who gave me a lot of advice and who had a passion for good-looking code. 

• Community

I can hardly imagine a life without Slack. And how was it possible to communicate without? You have channels for all kind of stuff. For Web Development in general, for taskhelp, for feedback, for UX, UI, for everything. And the best of it? You'll get an answer. Sure, sometimes you have to wait for an answer but keep in mind - there are 24 different time zones. Not everyone is awake when you are. 

I'm so glad that I've "met" another student I could learn with. We struggled at the same tasks and it felt like sitting next to each although we studied in different cities. Tip: Say hello at the beginning of your course and find someone you can interchange with! Sometimes you just need a second look to find a missing semicolon. 

• Course Access

I did the course in this short time period because I had to. Circumstances forced me to do so and although I wish there would have been more time for the tasks I feel confident with HTML, CSS, Ruby, Rails, ... I did an internship after the course (Web Development, Ruby on Rails) and I can tell you that although there's a lot I still have to learn, I felt good. Yes I needed way more time compared to the Web Devs in the company but I never felt lost. And regarding the bullet point above this paragraph "Course Access", you have it (the content) the rest of your life. So whenever I struggled, I not only used google and forums, I used my course and asked the community for help. 

Conclusion

I would do it again. And I can recommend it allover! 

This is my first time I do a bootcamp in order to learn programming and I have to admit that it is quite intense and challenging to finish the course in only 3 months, but I am confident that I will be able to do it. I think that, because I am receiving great support not only from my tutor and my mentor, but also from the other students and the people, who are working at Career Foundry. There are different communication channels where I can reach out for help, if I get stuck somewhere with a lesson. The curriculum is packed full with both front-end and back-end, which I find really awesome to learn so much and especially different topics. Only I am glad that I have seen some lines of code before, otherwise I would probably be lost a lot of times. So I am excited and hopeful to land a job as a junior developer after finishing the course :D