CareerFoundry

The course is essentially one third HTML, CSS, JS and jQuery with the other two thirds being Ruby on Rails (building an E-commerce site specifically). The content is clear and well-explained and there are always links to further resources in case you want to go a step further and learn more on top of the core exercise material. I was always encouraged and motivated by my tutor whenever I handed in exercises. I didn't have much interaction with my mentor - only 3 or 4 Skype calls I think. I think he would have been available via PM if I had needed to contact him though.

What sets the course apart from others is being able to interact with CF staff during and after the course, whether it be to get help with exercises or to ask for career advice. Being able to reach out to industry experts in this way is something that I've found very useful.

On the otherhand, the information in the curriculum is nothing that you couldn't find online in other cheaper or free courses. That's not to say the content isn't good, just that there are a lot of great free or cheap resources out there to learn web dev at the moment. I also thought the course was a bit lacking on teh JavaScript front. There were only a handful of exercises out of the 67 total that focused on this.
 

I am so fortunate to have stumbled upon the CareerFoundry during my research for a career change. I studied Psychology in college and had worked in tech for some time so I wanted to make a shift into a career that would make use of my degree while being relevant in today's workforce. 

The coursework is extremely well curated and includes outside links to articles and videos that can help further explain the lesson. All homework tasks have a relation to a real work environment, from learning how to write an email to your team about design developments, to understanding how to approach your stakeholders, to going through all the stages of a design cycle. 

I always felt supported by the advisors, mentors, tutors and careerfoundry staff I was in touch with. When I had to extend the course several times due to medical issues they were extremely accomodating and comforting. I felt championed by the CareerFoundry from start to finish and even after finishing. 

I am grateful to them for what I learned and for providing an all star platform for me to finally make the career change I have been needing to make. Thank you CF!

I would recommend the UX design course, it gives you the basics, you get a holistic overview after the course and you'll know where and how to develop your skills afterwards. Don't expect to be an experienced top-notch designer at the end of the course, but it definitely helps in your career. I got even two job offers within a month after I finished the course but I also have to admit, that the challenges were higher at my new workplace than expected. Creating wireframes for an MVP (for a UX case study) won't necessarly prepare you for the challenges of a real app with a complex navigation. As I said, it's a great course, but be ready to make an internship in this field after you finish the course.

CareerFoundry was a decent bootcamp. The staff is great,very helpful and supportive. I just finished and still looking for job. Hoping CF will be able to place me somehwere :)).

I want to say one thing here. Maybe its just me, but my experience with my tutor and mentor has not been very good. I was not getting response for questions from my mentor and only got a response when I submitted an achievement. I was told that for day to day queries I should talk to my tutor but my tutor was also very sparing in his responses. I have the option of changing mentors but I already had 3 changes as a result of mentors leaving or something else, so I decided to not ask for a change.

Some of my other friends have had good experience with their mentors....soooo...

Another thing is I think the curriculum could be revised to include more javaScript and small coding exercises for each lesson. I am going to meetups and I feel that there is still lots to learn (which might be the case with most bootcamps).

Overall my experience was good, there is lot of support and help from slack community and for the price I paid for the course I think I got a good output. I will still keep learning more courses from careerfoundry as when u pay for one course you get lifetime access to all other courses as well so thats a terrific deal in my mind and a big selling point.

 

I signed up for the web developer course due to the more affordable cost compared to some bootcamps. I ended up leaving after one month. To the company's credit, they did offer me a full refund due to my dissatisfaction. Below are the reasons I left.

-- Their curriculum is confusing and not clearly written. I understand they are a German company, but that's no excuse to have unclear, run-on sentences and poorly explained directions. I spent hours just trying to decipher what they were asking me to do. I would end up signing on to my (paid) Team Treehouse subscription and watching their video on the same subject just so I could learn it. I am not the only person who had this experience, just read the other reviews.

-- My mentor hardly bothered to reply to me, and when she did, she would either only partially answer my question or just send me a link to StackOverflow. Bear in mind I had already searched stack overflow and read the same threads she sent me, on my own. I am not paying a large sum of money for somebody to google my question and send me links. In addition, she would take days to reply, often not replying at all. It got to where I didn't bother asking anything any more.

So, to sum up, the curriculum was not even on par with the free courses out there. And the mentorship, which I think is most of what you're paying for, was basically nonexistent. One bright spot was my 'tutor' (who is considered more of a lower level helper I believe). He was actually wonderful and helpful, even though many times he could not answer my question and ended up googling things himself. At least he actually TRIED to help me, which I appreciate.

The company asked me to reconsider leaving a negative review online because it can hurt their business. I did think about it a lot and I let a month pass by before I decided to write this. In the end, I feel others should have the opportunity to weigh my experience before spending money. I feel that the curriculum and business model at CareerFoundry needs a significant amount of adjustment before it would begin to be more effective than other online sources already available for much less money. I believe they are motivated to keep improving themselves and they have told me they are already making changes to their curriculum based on my feedback. However I cannot recommend them as of the time of this writing. 

I am writing this review because I think that CF is perhaps heading in the wrong direction and needs to fix some things to be truly great. I sent this feedback to them so they know what I think, but I don't know how seriously they have taken my concerns and I think potential and new students need to know what they are getting into. I started the Web Development course in March and finished in September. 

The main issues I think need to be addressed: 

1. The new tutor/mentor system. Incompetent and inexperienced tutors. I believe that CF may be hiring less capable tutors to cut costs (and improve their graduate statistics.) 

I was undertaking the course during the switchover with the new tutor/mentor system. I was unhappy with it, so was able to switch to the old system. My problem with it: my tutor was very bad. She didn't seem to know what she was doing, she gave me code with mistakes, told me to just look at the code of other students' submissions when she didn't know what was wrong with mine. She couldn't help me when I had problems and had to refer my code to my mentor to him to look at and fix. He later told me I had all these mistakes in my code (which was code my tutor had given me.) 

My tutor had only finished a coding bootcamp this year. She was not capable to tutor others yet she was given a tutoring position. I see now in the Slack channel that CF graduates are becoming tutors after completing the course. If you are taking this course for the tutor/mentor system, you may be very disappointed as I do not believe these tutors are experienced or knowledgable enough. I was extremely lucky that I could switch back to the old system, but all these problems wasted about a month of my time. 

CF really needs to get back hiring experienced and capable tutors and mentors, otherwise the quality of their graduates' work will go down. 

2. I found no value in the Placement Team. I think they need to be better trained.

I am not sure how well they have been trained in terms of what students are learning and what companies are looking for. I constantly see job postings in the Career Slack channel of developer jobs, but many of them are for other languages. I realise that some students may have Java experience or C++ or whatever language, but I am guessing that most students only have Ruby on Rails experience which they learned from CareerFoundry.

Also, as my boyfriend is a tech recruiter for several Berlin startups, I trust his opinion and knowledge of what companies want. Some small things posted by the Placement team as advice, my boyfriend disagrees with. 

I was lucky to not have to rely on the Placement Team for help as they never sent me any job leads or anything like that. While my contact with them was pleasant, it was nothing of real value. For those reading this review though, do not be discouraged. While I was able to get interviews with companies thanks to my boyfriend's connections, the job I took was one I had applied to on my own. So, it can be done. I found a frontend position within two months of completing the web development course. 

Another thing to note:

The javascript / jQuery side of this course is very light. You will need to take additional courses (even free ones like codecademy, freecodecamp) if you want to become a frontend developer. 

 

TL:DR

This course says its written for beginners, but its not. The lessons are written by something other than a human being, and you will spend a lot of time asking other students to help you understand the instructions needed to complete an assignment. This course will make you feel dumb and confused. Also, you don’t really learn much – this course consists of a lot of “copying & pasting”.

 

1. You don’t really learn anything.

Yeah I said it – actually I typed it. Everything in this course you can find for free somewhere else. And I promise you, it’s just a google away. Do you want to know how I know this? I spent so much of my time looking at other resources than what CF had written it it’s lesson.You learn Bootstrap, Javascript ( haha that’s a joke – you actually just copy and paste javascript- you don’t learn anything.), APIs, and Ruby on Rails (haha another joke!).

 

     2. The Course is written by something other than a human being.

One of the things that bothered me was the way things were phrased in the course. Apparently this course was written for beginners, but I beg a differ. I spend about 2-3 hours just trying to understand what CF is trying to say in a lesson than I do actually doing the work. I have to re-read things 3-4 times and it makes the work very confusing. That’s not what I paid for and it’s absolutely frustrating.

 

    3. Mentor/ Tutor

One of the things I enjoyed was the Mentor/Tutor. But I undrestand why they are needed – they are needed because students have a hard time understanding the instructions that have been written in the lessons. The tutor and mentor are the only things good about this course. The tutor I had was super helpful and the mentor really helped me understand the industry.

 

As a current student at CareerFoundry, I have struggled imnesly. Every time I start a lesson I immediately get depressed.  I think to myself – “ Here goes another 3-4 hours of wasted time”. I really wish I would have gone to a different school or spent more money. If I have to spend $10k -$20k for something that I can atleast understand – I will TAKE IT! You may be wondering why I’m still enrolled – its simple – I spent money and now I can’t get my money back unless I graduate and then wait 6 months to get a job that never comes. Only then will I get my money back. I honestly feel like I was robbed through this course. I advise anyone considering to just think long and hard about what they value most from an online school. Once you've established what you want cross CF off your list. 

Having gone through the course, I wanted to leave a review for CareerFoundry, because it really helped me in the beginning reading about other people's experiences.

For me, I was looking for a career change and just general direction in life when I first started looking into web development programs. For me, there were 3 important criteria that needed to addressed:

- flexibility

- cost

- support/job assistance

The biggest factor for me was flexibility – I needed to be able to go at the pace that I wanted to go, because I knew that I would have some weeks with a lot of down time and some weeks with little down time from work. I couldn’t stick to scheduled sessions and CareerFoundry was great for that because I could submit my exercises whenever and however often I wanted to.

Cost was another issue – a lot of these programs were starting off in the $10,000 range and I was nervous to commit that much when I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make it or have what it takes to do well in web development. CareerFoundry is a lot less expensive at $3,000 and was much easier to stomach.

The last thing I needed to know was that what I was learning was relevant and good enough that I could find a job with it afterwards. Like most programs, CareerFoundry has a job guarantee program that really helps you prepare. The job specialists are there for one-on-one chats and were always responsive to my questions.

I just started my job search, but I’m optimistic. Going through the program really helped me get started and made me realize I want to focus on front-end HTML/CSS jobs.

If you are looking for guided mentoring, this is not the course for you. Most of the time you're totally in your own and you're lucky if the tutor even looks at your code. I was sold on this mentor/tutor thing as somehow receiving extra care and help, but the reality is that you get more out of udemy and other free resources. In at least one instance, I ended up using the resources of another bootcamp to make sense of their materials. They portray this as a 15 hour/week program, but I found myself consistently putting in 30 + hours just to keep up. And this is not because the course is rigorous, but because often the lessons are poorly written. I learned more from self-study than I did from the actual course. My tutor often made feel like I should apologize for having questions; in almost every instance they were often critical of me asking anything. What a complete waste of time and money