Profile: General Assembly
It is common for college students to regret their choices for college. In a recent study by Gallup, more than half of the US college graduates would redo their post K-12 education; the biggest reason being choice of the wrong major. It may be due to the lack of passion, realizing it is not what they wanted to do, or bad job prospects in the future. It is understandable that more than half of high school seniors failed to make the correct choice for their career path that will last for decades. During their K-12 education, most of these students can’t go to the bathroom without permission. After college, these young graduates would be likely to want to redo the choice they made four years ago if they could.
College majors’ curriculums don’t always include the skills students need for their dream job or career path. In some cases, when college students regret the major they chose, they can’t transfer their credit and have to stay for extra years with extra tuition. However, choosing the wrong major isn’t the end of your career or goal; there are many alternative ways to achieve your dream. If the obstacle is only a matter of skill set, it can be caught up later in other schools, like applying for a Master Degree, technical, or professional schools.
Regret is for the past. We must look forward if we want to have a better future and to correct the mistakes in the past. College graduates always can pick up what they missed back in college. It is common for young graduates to attend these technical schools to cover topics they missed in college. They are vocational schools for professional jobs.
Software and programming skills are highly demanded in the workforce and employers usually offer great compensation and benefit to high tech employees. Programming bootcamp and workshops are gaining popularity among the young college graduates who didn’t learn the technical skills needed for their dream job. People are attending programming bootcamps in order to learn programming languages and land programming jobs. At the same time, there are businesses and recruiters looking for talent who graduated from secondary schools, as they could be perfect fit for their companies.
General Assembly is one of the professional educational facilities that saw this demand of talent and skill; they took this opportunity and opened their schools globally. They have 20 campuses worldwide and more than half of the campuses are located in the US. The rest of the campuses are located at Australia, Hong Kong SAR, United Kingdom, and Singapore. At the moment, General Assembly has more than 35,000 alumni and more than 250 instructors worldwide - the instructors being experts in the fields they work in. Nevertheless, they have more than 2,500 hiring partners that are looking forward to hiring graduates from their company - some of them being Fortune 1000 companies.
General Assembly is offering courses that teach web development, data science, android/iOS development, digital marketing, user experience design, and other technical skills. These skills are highly demanded in many businesses. High skill labor jobs like data analytics, programmers, software developers, and web developers usually have high compensation and great benefits. The reasons why these jobs are in such high demand is because of their high learning curve. Not everyone can understand or is interested in learning the complicated math or the logic of programming languages.
Soft skills in business like leadership, cold call, innovation, marketing, and management are important in business too. Unsurprisingly, management skills needed for managerial levels positions. It will be needed for those who are in their career for many years, continually integrating themselves in their work. For those who had a job for years and looking forward to take a promotion and a leadership role, they would go to General Assembly to study some theory of management. Unlike most coding bootcamps that only teaches programming languages, General Assembly also offer management courses like innovation, and product management for future managers and even entrepreneurs.
There are differences among studying in General Assembly and in college. Unlike college courses which focus the grading in midterm and final exams, General Assembly’s grading policy is more focused in homework assignments and the grade is either pass or fail. Attendance will be a major factor too. After finishing the course, the student will receive a letter of completion on whatever topics they studied. Also, their returned graduates can receive discount on further courses. However, the US Department of Education and students of General Assembly is currently unable to apply for federal loan or aid at this point in time.
The success of General Assembly can be attributed to the fact that they saw the high demand of talents in businesses and good paying jobs among young graduates in developed nations. Many companies across the globe are looking for professional business developers, programmers, data analytics, designers, project managers, and other talents with professional skills. Sometimes offering great compensation may not attract the right person. At the same time, colleges sometimes are not doing the best to train the young graduates for the work force. Thus, there are young college graduates who are looking forward for career development. Why not simply help them achieve their career goal if they pay tuition? This is a brilliant business idea of satisfying two parties’ demands while making profit out of them. At the moment, General Assembly is continuing to expand as they hire more expert instructors to teach their expertise in their field.