CareerFoundry

To Make a Long Story Short
The UX Designer course at CareerFoundry helped me to evolve my career and to land a job as a Junior UX Designer within three months after I finished the course. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is really interested and willing to make some serious effort. This is not a taster course and you should really be convinced of what you’re doing since you invest a lot of time and money. If you just want to learn more about the basics (so that you can decide better if this is the right thing for you) then you might be better off with the cheaper and shorter UX Fundamentals course offered by CareerFoundry, too.

My Personal Professional Background
I studied Interface Design as a specialization field of Industrial Design in Germany. After that, I worked as a freelancer on minor complex projects (mostly graphic design) and at a small Start-Up as an Interface Designer. When I began to feel stuck in my career I took some time off to reflect on my very own skills, needs, and motivations. I deepened my knowledge and became even more fascinated by UX. Also, I discovered that I already was (or at least wanted to be) a UX Designer but there were some parts missing. I enrolled as a student at CareerFoundry to close those gaps. My expectations were high.

The Course
It started quite easy and flat but after just a few lessons it became harder and really rich in content. The schedule was tough and after some time on the course, I had to realize that I wouldn’t be able to finish the course within three months. I put high standards and demands on both myself and the quality of my work. I had to extend the course timeframe which was no problem. My mentor and tutor cheered me up and encouraged me since my submissions have been excellent.
The course content has been quite comprehensive and well curated. In real life probably no employer would hardly pay for all the steps taken in the sketched design process but it’s good to have a broad understanding of many different design methods and strategies. The topics that have been taught are not CareerFoundry exclusive. Indeed, you could manage to find and learn everything online for free. The big difference is the very good didactic conditioning and the chunking into lessons and tasks. You will apply what you’ve learned on a real project. Any submission will be reviewed by your tutor (day-to-day tasks) or your mentor (final task of the block) providing valuable feedback. They responded very quickly. I came to know my mentors and tutor to be very committed and I hope we will keep in touch. They have a great attitude of sharing their knowledge and experience. I never felt like I was bothering them and always felt encouraged.

Feel free to watch the project showcase on my behance profile: https://www.behance.net/gallery/54800867/Project-Showcase-Taskly-Task-Management-App

After The Course
When you finalize your course you can optionally take the Career Change Achievement. I would highly recommend this free extension to anyone who is going on job hunt. The lessons give you some very helpful tips and kind of guide you through the first time of your job search. They help (force) you to reflect on yourself and your newly acquired skills. In the end, you will understand yourself a lot better and you will be able to articulate your goals and your strengths in a polished application package. In my personal case, this led to a job offer after three weeks of searching and applying!

 

A joined CareerFoundry's UI course at the beginning of 2017. I had looked over a lot of other courses before starting before deciding CareerFoundry was the best for what I was looking for. 

I would say that overall, my experience was good! I really enjoyed my mentor and tutors. Occasionally throughout the course I had a few questions that I couldn't find good answers to by just perusing the web. When I reached out to my mentor, I was able to get great answers and hands on instruction until i finally understood. That alone was invaluable to me. 

As I was approaching the end of the course, I started applying at UI jobs around the country before eventually landing a position at a startup. Occasionally in the interviews, I'd recieve a question that I wasn't sure how to answer - this was, again, where my mentors and tutors helped. Talking with them gave me the confidence to keep applying.

I would say that much of the content found throughout the course wasn't exactly mind-blowing or game-changing; it could be found throughout the web if you knew where to look. But CareerFoundry has collected it and given good tutorial of how to get your feet wet into UI. 

In my opinion, this course won't teach you to become a great designer - but it will help you get into UI if you already know how to design and just aren't sure how to make the transition forward. If that's you, I'd recommend this course! 

(Btw, I'm now making double my old salary at my new job. Thanks CF!)

I took the iOS developer course starting in August '16 and graduated about 6 months later. I have to say that it was a good course and I am now an iOS developer having completed the course within the required 6 months. I thoroughly enjoyed the content and found the exercises to be clear and generally easy to follow. One criticism of the content is that sometimes while searching for answers I would come across almost exactly the same content in free articles. This didn't bother me too much because, for me, the key to this course was the support from a tutor and a mentor.

I had tried many times to learn programming on my own using only free resources in the past but it never came to anything because I would get stuck and not have anyone to ask advice from and so lose motivation and interest. The difference with this course is that you do have someone to ask for help if you need it in the form of your tutor, but you also have a community of others who are going through the course and you can also ask for help from them.

Generally my tutor and my mentor were very responsive to my questions and quite knowledgable about the exercises and potential solutions. They were both very nice, supportive and helpful however on the odd occassion it did seem like my tutor might not have been through the exercises in full detail.

Once I had completed my course I began looking for a job and at this point I felt like maybe the course had not fully prepared me to get my first developer role because I was not getting any responses to the job applications I was making. I also felt like CareerFoundry was more geared towards finding jobs for the web dev/UI/UX graduates simply because there are substantially more people doing those courses. This may have been true however I realised that I had to be persistent and also to continue to develop my skills while I was searching for a job.

Eventually, with the help of Sami at CF (who is brilliant) I was able to find an incredible job doing exactly what I want to at a company that does some really exciting stuff. Sami helped me to position myself in the market and to understand the value I could offer to potential employers, rather than just feeling like a novice with no skills! As part of the process for applying to the job I currently have, I was asked to build a mini app and was able to use some of the knowledge I gained doing the course so the content is definitely relevant in the real world.

Overall it is a good course because of the tutor/mentor and community aspects. As with any course there are some weaknesses, however you will get out what you put in and if you are willing to put the time and effort in it is possible to find a job as a developer after graduating.

 

 

I would honestly not recommend this program. This company is a startup and has changed it's curriculum since my graduation 6 months ago. I have a formal degree in art and took the UI design course. 

Pros

-Affordable (the price is cheaper than most bootcamps)

-Community (They had a strong online community)

-Assignments (You did get good assignments that would help you learn)

Cons

-Little job placement help (Most of the people I met from CF haven't found jobs, It's been 6 months and I haven't found one either. Most of the job placement help was based on the HQ in Berlin. I also expected them to have relationships with companies for placement which I don't think they have)

-Written tutorials (There were plenty of written tutorials that could have been more clear, or were lacking a short video explanation. It's 2017 I was very disappointed that there wasn't a single video tutorial.)

-Little to no portfolio help (At my time of graduation there was little to no help to tell you how to make a portfolio that would land you a job, they would just tell you to make a portfolio...)

All in all most of the information could be learned on Lynda, Coursera, or Treehouse I thought. If I could do it over...I don't think that I would. The idea that you can pay a few grand and spend a couple months learning to become a designer is a larger one, but have realistic expectations. Google around on medium to see what other designers say. I think that it usually takes years of training and most importantly: WORK EXPERIENCE to land a great design job.

A fantastic course. Quick advice is to really use the guide of how many assignments you need to finish a week and not fall behind.  With my busy life with a full-time job and young children, it was difficult not to.  However, the course made it very easy for me to catch up when I could and my mentor and the student advisors were super supportive and accomodating.  I really felt like everyone was there to help me succeed.  The Slack community was also incredibly helpful.  Being a marketing professional with not much formal education in art and design, this course was extremely educational not only with learning about the world of UI design, but also art theory and training in design, which I really enjoyed.  The adminstrators are always changing things so you can be assured that it is always up to date and they also work with feedback to improve it constantly so the course just gets better and better.  It is not an easy course, even with someone who has a bit of a design background such as myself, but it is incredibly rewarding.  Every time I would see another student's work, I would be a little discouraged and think that I would never achieve something like that.  But it also drove me to push myself harder to succeed and I ending achieving much more than I thought I could.  I learned to use others work as inspiration and I think it made me a much better designer.  If you put the work into it, you will do well.  I would highly recommend this course to anyone who is thinking about going into this field.

The instruction is excellent. Not only are the tutors and mentors very helpful, the Slack community supports each other so well. There is a wide range of skill sets that choose to take courses. The diversity of experience and thought leads to quick solutions. It's still incumbent upon students to take control of their destiny. The staff is responsive and flexible to student needs often changing tutors based upon schedules and needs. It's as simple as a request and following up.

 

The career support is also wonderful with contracted career specialists that offer consistent 1 to 1 contacts, office hours for students with a simple question, and many group events students can attend. 

I finished a web dev course at CareerFoundry in about 5 months with 20 hours learning a week. I had no previous experience in this field, except 2 courses at Codecademy. Before everything, here is my opinion about their mentorship: you get a tutor and a mentor, the tutor approves your excercises, so it is a daily communication, the mentor helps with bigger issues and gives you feedback (video review) after each achievement, and there are 4 of them. There are also 4 skype calls with him. My mentor was helpful and answered usually in 1 day. My first tutor probably left CF at the middle of my course, but that was a good thing as she did not do much, only approved all of my tasks without any helpful review or suggestion. My second tutor was the opposite, he was extremely helpful and always gave me extra information. Thanks Judah!

So CF promises you could be a web developer after a course, if you follow all the instructions, learning schedule etc. I just finished a course, so I don't have a job yet, I am doing the Career Achievement, which is their help to do a career change and so far it is very helpful.

The course content was professional, detailed and understandable, they provide a lot of external links where you can learn more. So basically they give you a really good base knowledge and if you are interested you can build on it. I would say you could be a web developer if you carry on learning and working after the 6 months. I guess it is realistic to get a job you love in 6 months after the course, if you keep working hard and creating more and more projects. 

Great course and worth every penny! Allison was a fantastic tutor who was very informative and thorough in evaluation of my work and in catch ups. The syllabus was extensive and touched on all the key elements of User Research. Using what I learnt from the course I was able to turn an internship into a full time position, changing all the UX processes in the agency. 

Despite the course being advertsied as a UX Design course it was great to have some exposure to some UI in the later stages of the course, which again put me in a great position for future portfolio work and interviews for my first design based job.

Allison also had some great advice at the end of the course for trying to secure work.

I did find it quite frustrating after the course when CareerFoundry (not Allison) offered to help and advise me with my job search and getting into a career. There was a brief exchange of emails before they stopped replying all together - I even mentioned this in my feedback to them soon after the course was over with no response.

Other than a total breakdown in communication at a time when I had many questions I would highly recommend the course to others. In fact, I am frequently messaged on Linkedin by potential students who I highly recommend the course to.

I learned so much from the UI Immersion Bootcamp! The content was organised and broken down so well, and I love that I got to apply my learnings to different projects and have a portfolio by the end. I loved that there was a mentor and tutor to review my work after each assignment so I could ask questions and understand if I was on the right track. The structure of the course held me accountable to complete all the work, which was very helpful too. Would definitely recommend this course to anyone looking to learn very important design skills!