Why an Online Learning Startup Is Offering Tech Job Tryouts

Easier to monetize in the short term, than are the MOOC undergraduate and graduate courses that were originally thought to be changing the face of education. JL

Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times:

The evolution points to the role that nontraditional education organizations might play in addressing the needs of workers and employers in the fast-changing labor market for technology skills.“For every Stanford graduate, there are hundreds of people without that kind of pedigree who can do just as well. ”Acquiring skills is one thing, but more than 900 graduates have obtained jobs, including more than 20 workers at Google

Udacity, an online learning start-up founded by a pioneer of self-driving cars, is finally taking the wraps off a job trial program it has worked on for the last year with 80 small companies.

The program, called Blitz, provides what is essentially a brief contract assignment, much like an internship. Employers tell Udacity the skills they need, and Udacity suggests a single candidate or a few. For the contract assignment, which usually lasts about three months, Udacity takes a fee worth 10 to 20 percent of the worker’s salary. If the person is then hired, Udacity does not collect any other fees, such as a finder’s fee.

For small start-ups, a hiring decision that goes bad can be a time-consuming, costly distraction. “This lets companies ease their way into hiring without the hurdle of making a commitment upfront,” said Sebastian Thrun, co-founder and chairman of Udacity.

When Udacity started four years ago, there were predictions it could transform higher education. But in recent years it has homed in on filling the high-tech skills gap.

Half a million tech jobs went unfilled last year. By 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs in America, and only 400,000 computer science graduates to fill them, according to government statistics and think-tank projections.

The Blitz initiative and Udacity’s evolution point to the role that nontraditional education organizations might play in addressing the needs of workers and employers in the fast-changing labor market for technology skills.

Mr. Thrun, a former Stanford professor and Google engineer who led the company’s effort in self-driving cars, said he was also trying to nudge the tech industry’s hiring beyond its elite-college bias.

“For every Stanford graduate, there are hundreds of people without that kind of pedigree who can do just as well,” he said.

Udacity now has 13 job-targeted courses for what it calls nanodegrees, including some to train web developers, data analysts, machine-learning engineers and Android programmers. Three courses have just been added to cater to hot fields: artificial intelligence, virtual reality and self-driving cars.

The nanodegree courses typically cost $200 a month and take three to six months to complete. They are rigorous and come with an unusual payment plan: If you complete a nanodegree course, you get half your money back. Completion rates range from 12 percent to 25 percent.

Acquiring skills is one thing, but landing a job is another. Since Udacity’s nanodegree courses began two years ago, more than 900 graduates have obtained jobs, including more than 20 workers at Google.

Miraj Hassanpur, a computer science major at California State University, Sacramento, wanted to be a developer who worked with the Android operating system after he graduated in 2014. “But it was hard to break in,” he said.

Mr. Hassanpur, 25, got a job at Accenture, the professional services company, where he worked for a year doing programming in the Java computer language for a government client. But he wanted to focus on Android, so he went to Udacity for the Android nanodegree. The degree was created by engineers at Google, where Android was largely developed.

Mr. Hassanpur began his Blitz trial at a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., in early 2016 and was hired in April. His compensation — salary and stock — is “definitely better” than what he made at Accenture, he said.

The 22-person start-up is still under wraps and will not even reveal its name. It is working on artificial intelligence technology meant for consumers.

Hendrik Dahlkamp, a founder and the chief technology officer of this mystery company, called the Udacity program “a very low-risk way of hiring someone. You’re not stuck with the person” if it doesn’t work out.

If someone has made it through a Udacity course, he said, it is a sign that person is a self-starter.

James Peterson, 22, has a high school diploma and completed one year of community college. He has had minimum-wage jobs at McDonald’s and Vince’s Spaghetti Express, a fast-food pasta restaurant in Temecula, Calif.

Mr. Peterson started with a couple of the free courses at Udacity, and then paid for a nanodegree course in web development that he began in August 2015. It took him five months to complete, and $500 of his $1,000 investment was refunded.

He trimmed his hours at the restaurant and spent up to 70 hours a week on the Udacity course. “It was pretty difficult because I had no prior experience,” Mr. Peterson said. “All of my free time was on the course.”

Within weeks of finishing, Mr. Peterson landed a job at Einstein Industries, where he works on websites for physicians. He makes three times what he did before, and this week moved out of his father’s house and into an apartment in San Diego, near his new job.