5 ms·

Codecademy launches Reskill USA

44 points by hirokitakeuchi 12y ago

fourstar 12y ago
> ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment. No it won't. > By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the jobs of today. Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know: HTML and CSS Javascript jQuery Github
- colbyh 12y ago
  I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering, and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.
  - dashboardfront 12y ago
    Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.
    - analog31 12y ago
      Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online. I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're interested in.
      - dashboardfront 12y ago
        Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.
        analog31 12y ago
        I suggest starting with something like an Arduino robot kit.
    - jlees 12y ago
      I'd say the closest things would be actual honest-to-goodness academic courses online, e.g Coursera/MIT/etc computer science tracks.
      - dashboardfront 12y ago
        This is actually where I started, with MIT's intro OCW. I began to worry, though, that I would be better served learning something directly relevant to the job market, and so half-way in I moved onto The Odin Project. My plan as it stands is to first get a grasp of web development so I can have a solid chance of getting a job after graduation, but I intend to go through a lot of MOOCs once I'm done with TOP. I've got a year and 2/3rds until graduation, which will hopefully let me learn a fair bit.
    - dpflan 12y ago
      jlees has a good suggestion. I wanted to add Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all). For example, the course 'Artificial Intelligence for Robotics' (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373 https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373) may be what you're looking for. I don't know your current skill level for programming nor understanding of mathematics (stats and probability) and computer science, but the course can be self-paced, which can make it great for presenting a concept and allowing you time to dive into the material, especially supporting foundational material. There are also other lower level courses. Good luck with your studies!
      - dashboardfront 12y ago
        Taking stats ATM; I've got the AI /w robots one marked down in my list of MOOCs, though I've put it at the bottom as I think I've got to cover a lot more 'fundamentals' first. Thanks for the heads up though.
moeedm 12y ago
Unfortunate domain name.
mtmail 12y ago
Are they targeting outplacement companies? Microsoft Certification centers used to target job centers. I've been to a Microsoft training and couldn't believe somebody without understanding of MS Windows would want to become a certified Windows NT server administrator. Simple answer: "the job center is paying for the training". Well in this case it was for soldiers to find jobs in the open market after their 12month serving time ended.
puredemo 12y ago
$12k seems a bit steep.
chrismealy 12y ago
There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies. The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills. A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry. -- http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf
- malandrew 12y ago
  Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or fewer bones). Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone surplus.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    You misunderstand the nature of the implicit argument. The allegory doesn't have to address the intricacies of bone accounting or the fantasies of bone accountants because the story it describes has already played out countless times in countless economic sectors with one overwhelmingly favored result. The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the person who believes that this time the story will have a different ending.
templeos2 12y ago
We need a good tutorial for TempleOS. It will last longer than Windows or Linux.
brandonmenc 12y ago
> 3 months: How long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to qualify for computing and web development jobs. I'm genuinely curious as to how many people here, who either program or hire programmers, will say that the above is a true statement.
- sgdread 12y ago
  It took me 5 month to get my first Java job (every day 4hrs after work; 8 hours on weekends). And now I see how lucky I was to get that junior position. It took almost year to hone basic Java skills and learn necessary basic stack of technologies to do plain Java projects. It took another year till I got my enterprise stack skills to acceptable level. Every technology/framework is 1-1.5k pages book reading and hours of practice just to start doing something useful. And then you have to repeat that every year, because frameworks updating faster than you can learn, priorities shifting, you forget things. Edit: However, I must say, ^ was done almost in vacuum: I had noone to ask and had limited access to the Internet (sorry, no Stackoverflow for you :). With good instructors, well-prepared programs and strict discipline in classromms, I would say it is possible to get into entry-level positions.
- nperez 12y ago
  Not jobs. Maybe an internship. I self-educated starting at a young age, and started almost every job until recently with a very low paying trial period. If someone is showing interest and room for growth, they may qualify for that. It's more of an investment than a hire at first.
- analog31 12y ago
  Just for historical context: Back in the early 80s, a relative of mine taught the intro programming course in an adult education program. Her students were getting hired. Now, they were adults -- mature and motivated. At the same time, I went through pretty much the same curriculum in a high school course in BASIC, that has been my only formal training in programming. I don't know about three months, but people were getting programming jobs with what would seem like pretty minimal training. I got to see some programming getting done thanks to internships etc., and the work environment was pretty loose, where you could get away with a fair amount of learning on the job. It didn't seem all that hard, and despite the fact that I enjoyed programming, I wasn't sure that I wanted to make a career of it, so I pursued other interests. Today I use programming extensively in my work, but am not employed as a programmer per se.
dccoolgai 12y ago
I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft: unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>> "Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!" ::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"
primitivesuave 12y ago
Even with a great college education in CS and an undying passion for coding, it took me a year to really get web development. It's easy to learn the code, and I believe the MOOCs of the world have succeeded in providing great free resources for learning structural thinking. However, no course can teach you intuition - engineering intuition is the easiest characteristic to assess in a job interview and the skill that is most sought after.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
beatpanda 12y ago
I wish we would stop with the fantasy that we can return to the golden age of Fordism, and instead work on distributing the productivity gains of technology to reduce all of our working hours.

> ReskillUSA will close the gap between technical education and employment. No it won't. > By connecting students with accessible vocational education programs and employers eager to hire from them, we're training more Americans for the jobs of today. Yeah because the "jobs of today" all require you to know: HTML and CSS Javascript jQuery Github

colbyh 12y ago
I actually asked their CEO about this on PH. Building websites != engineering, and we need more of the latter. I do think there's a place for skills-based learning to take up some of the slack, but simply rehashing the same Rails/JS tutorials isn't going to cut it unfortunately.
- dashboardfront 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much resources online that say "Learn How to Become a Software Engineer!" without costing you three/four years of extra education and a sizeable sum of money. I'm learning how to program at the moment alongside my degree, and almost all the resources I've seen online are oriented towards web development; consequentially, that's what I'm learning, even though I'd much rather be learning whatever lets me go program things like rockets, robots, self-driving cars, etc., with the hope that I'll be able to eventually move towards that end goal.
  - analog31 12y ago
    Are there any chances at your school to learn Matlab or LabVIEW? Another option is to look into what people are doing with Arduino boards. I think that the Arduino crowd have created a lot of tutorials and example codes online. I'm not touting these languages or tools as the best, but as ways to be exposed to the kinds of programming that people do in areas that you're interested in.
    - dashboardfront 12y ago
      Sadly, no. I attend the worst of schools; a business school. As my education is European, I'm not allowed to just switch majors either. I'll take a look at your recommendation, though; thanks.
      - analog31 12y ago
        I suggest starting with something like an Arduino robot kit.
  - jlees 12y ago
    I'd say the closest things would be actual honest-to-goodness academic courses online, e.g Coursera/MIT/etc computer science tracks.
    - dashboardfront 12y ago
      This is actually where I started, with MIT's intro OCW. I began to worry, though, that I would be better served learning something directly relevant to the job market, and so half-way in I moved onto The Odin Project. My plan as it stands is to first get a grasp of web development so I can have a solid chance of getting a job after graduation, but I intend to go through a lot of MOOCs once I'm done with TOP. I've got a year and 2/3rds until graduation, which will hopefully let me learn a fair bit.
  - dpflan 12y ago
    jlees has a good suggestion. I wanted to add Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/all). For example, the course 'Artificial Intelligence for Robotics' (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373 https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373) may be what you're looking for. I don't know your current skill level for programming nor understanding of mathematics (stats and probability) and computer science, but the course can be self-paced, which can make it great for presenting a concept and allowing you time to dive into the material, especially supporting foundational material. There are also other lower level courses. Good luck with your studies!
    - dashboardfront 12y ago
      Taking stats ATM; I've got the AI /w robots one marked down in my list of MOOCs, though I've put it at the bottom as I think I've got to cover a lot more 'fundamentals' first. Thanks for the heads up though.

moeedm 12y ago

Unfortunate domain name.

mtmail 12y ago

Are they targeting outplacement companies? Microsoft Certification centers used to target job centers. I've been to a Microsoft training and couldn't believe somebody without understanding of MS Windows would want to become a certified Windows NT server administrator. Simple answer: "the job center is paying for the training". Well in this case it was for soldiers to find jobs in the open market after their 12month serving time ended.

puredemo 12y ago

$12k seems a bit steep.

chrismealy 12y ago

There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies. The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills. A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry. -- http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf http://www.philipharvey.info/directjob.pdf

malandrew 12y ago
Meh. While entertaining, this is a fallacious allegory. This fails to consider the divisibility of bones, some dogs getting more than one bone or the fact that in real life scenarios that the number of bones can fluctuate (more or fewer bones). Furthermore, the site states that there are 1 million unclaimed bones. While I won't argue either in favor of or against that figure, but assuming there are unclaimed bones, your allegory would be more correct if there were something like 105 bones and 5 dogs still went went hungry every day despite the 5-bone surplus.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  You misunderstand the nature of the implicit argument. The allegory doesn't have to address the intricacies of bone accounting or the fantasies of bone accountants because the story it describes has already played out countless times in countless economic sectors with one overwhelmingly favored result. The burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of the person who believes that this time the story will have a different ending.

templeos2 12y ago

We need a good tutorial for TempleOS. It will last longer than Windows or Linux.

brandonmenc 12y ago

> 3 months: How long it takes a dedicated beginner to learn the skills to qualify for computing and web development jobs. I'm genuinely curious as to how many people here, who either program or hire programmers, will say that the above is a true statement.

sgdread 12y ago
It took me 5 month to get my first Java job (every day 4hrs after work; 8 hours on weekends). And now I see how lucky I was to get that junior position. It took almost year to hone basic Java skills and learn necessary basic stack of technologies to do plain Java projects. It took another year till I got my enterprise stack skills to acceptable level. Every technology/framework is 1-1.5k pages book reading and hours of practice just to start doing something useful. And then you have to repeat that every year, because frameworks updating faster than you can learn, priorities shifting, you forget things. Edit: However, I must say, ^ was done almost in vacuum: I had noone to ask and had limited access to the Internet (sorry, no Stackoverflow for you :). With good instructors, well-prepared programs and strict discipline in classromms, I would say it is possible to get into entry-level positions.
nperez 12y ago
Not jobs. Maybe an internship. I self-educated starting at a young age, and started almost every job until recently with a very low paying trial period. If someone is showing interest and room for growth, they may qualify for that. It's more of an investment than a hire at first.
analog31 12y ago
Just for historical context: Back in the early 80s, a relative of mine taught the intro programming course in an adult education program. Her students were getting hired. Now, they were adults -- mature and motivated. At the same time, I went through pretty much the same curriculum in a high school course in BASIC, that has been my only formal training in programming. I don't know about three months, but people were getting programming jobs with what would seem like pretty minimal training. I got to see some programming getting done thanks to internships etc., and the work environment was pretty loose, where you could get away with a fair amount of learning on the job. It didn't seem all that hard, and despite the fact that I enjoyed programming, I wasn't sure that I wanted to make a career of it, so I pursued other interests. Today I use programming extensively in my work, but am not employed as a programmer per se.

dccoolgai 12y ago

I love that we are bringing people into the industry, but I wonder if it's really responsible to plaster figures like "$80K for 3 months of easy training" is really a responsible way to market that... I know you have to pragmatic to some degree and speak to people in the language they will listen in... but people who go into coding "just to make money" generally end up like anyone who goes into a field just to make money without any love of the craft: unhappy. After 20-some years in and around tech, I have come to just accept this cycle while humming Elton John's "Circle of Life" in my head: "Make a ton of easy money in tech!" ::>> "So many people in tech just to make money." ::>> "Tech Crash Due to Overhype About How Much Money There Is" ::>> "No one makes money in tech - go get an MBA" ::>> "Someone in tech made a ton of money!" ::>> "Make a ton of easy money in tech!"

primitivesuave 12y ago

Even with a great college education in CS and an undying passion for coding, it took me a year to really get web development. It's easy to learn the code, and I believe the MOOCs of the world have succeeded in providing great free resources for learning structural thinking. However, no course can teach you intuition - engineering intuition is the easiest characteristic to assess in a job interview and the skill that is most sought after.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

beatpanda 12y ago

I wish we would stop with the fantasy that we can return to the golden age of Fordism, and instead work on distributing the productivity gains of technology to reduce all of our working hours.