The secret Chingu cohorts Master Plan (just between you and me)
Background — What is Chingu?
Chingu is a flexible & remote learning program for developers and aspiring developers who want to complete projects and gain experience. We provide a team to work with, deadlines, structure, collaboration experiences, accountability tools, and a friendly community with shared goals.
People come out of Chingu with confidence that they can build, portfolio projects, and the soft skills that the 21st century world needs.
TL;DR: Chingu strives to provide 70% of the value of a coding bootcamp for less than 1% of the cost.
Some Chingu Stats & tidbits I’m proud of:
- 11,000+ developers (and designers / data scientists) have sought collaboration opportunities from Chingu.
- Those learners come from 144 different countries, aka 73% of the world’s countries.
- over 2.5 million collaboration-related messages have been sent across all Chingu cohorts.
- Over 2,025 remote teams launched (we define a team as any optimal matching of tech learners — teams building a project, pair-programming matches, mentor matches, to name a few).
- 3200+ pair-programming hours generated. This one is likely a lot longer in reality, as members don’t always tell us how long they pair-programmed. But to give you an idea: in the last Voyage there was one pair that pair-coded for 200 hours (…in 6 weeks!).
- At any moment of any day, there are likely Chingu teams helping each other build & learn. One time we calculated the Github commit average per hour for a full Voyage: 4.4 per/hour.
We’ve also helped foster the kind of experiences that have made people say:
“Thank you! I owe Chingu everything! These past 8 weeks have been better than my last 3 years of university!”
“I just want to thank everyone at Chingu for their amazing support and for this awesome opportunity. It just shows how 21st century education looks like.”
“I got my first developer job at the age of 35 largely due to the technical AND soft skills I gained through Chingu.”
“I realized pretty quickly that I was learning more from the Voyage project than from everything I did in the entire rest of the year put together.”
“A year ago, I didn’t know about Chingu. Today, I’m confident saying it has been the best experience I’ve ever had.”
“Chingu was a great place for me because while working on the projects there, I honed my skills and I learned how to collaborate with other developers. During my job interview process, I was able to speak on the projects I worked on at Chingu, it impressed my interviewers and consequently, I landed a job at a Fortune 500.”
“Second time as a female-PM in an all-guys team! ;-D Chingu is the best place for gender equality.”
“Chingu is bringing together highly motivated people using modern communication tools and exposing these Chingu cohort members to real time, distributed collaboration in a very real and practical way. The remote developers we’ve hired via Chingu already ‘get it’, they understand what it takes to be a successful remote developer.”
“Thanks again for all that you do. I was about to look for a huge loan just to go to bootcamp to get this exact style of learning.”
“Well I got my first active development responsibility as a result of my Chingu learnings that’s all I need to say.”
Yet, this is just scratching the surface of what Chingu can provide for learners around the world
Despite how proud I am of all the above, I know that there are so many ways we can improve and provide learners with better opportunities.
There have been two fundamental constraints that are holding us back from going to the next level:
1. Lack of resources & a full-time team
With a few part-time people working on Chingu, we’re constantly trying to keep up and have difficulty making substantial improvements.
The above stated Chingu stats and tidbits were accomplished with a small number of people working part-time seriously on this, and an assortment of lovely volunteers who come and go. Imagine the benefits we could provide if Chingu had a full-time team and resources to invest in improvements and building new tools for teams/ learners?
With people working full-time, we’ll be able to deliver more value to our members, and be able to continuously go to the next level.
2. The MOOC Mindset
While I love that MOOCs exist and believe they are hugely beneficial in the world, the data is clear on how effective they are from an individual’s perspective.
The vast majority of people who join a MOOC program don’t take it seriously. A recent MIT study found that only 3% of people who join their free MOOC courses reach completion. Because Chingu is collaborative and social, we haven’t had anything near that number, but it’s still been a problem. Also, because Chingu is collaborative and social, it is imperative that it is a priority and people take it seriously.
We value what we pay for and the opposite is also true. When someone joins Chingu and then nonchalantly decides to quit, it lets down the team and means the few people running Chingu have to devote resources to trying to find a replace for that member (instead of making improvements in other areas). If we cut down on these situations even by 30%, we free up so many resources to make improvements for our members.
It is for the above reasons that Chingu will be transitioning to a paid model starting in November with Voyage-13 — $29 for a single 6-week Voyage or $129 for a yearly subscription to Voyages. For past members who have completed a past project or prework project, you can still join Voyage-12 — starts October 1st — under the current model (you can find the submission link in #chingu-news).
So, in short, the master plan is:
- Build an affordable remote collaboration program for developers to gain the skills they need.
2. Use that money to invest in improvements & open it up to all tech learners to collaborate.
(Designers, data scientists, digital markers, product managers, PMs)
Note: this includes exploring ways for serious learners who cannot afford Chingu to gain access.
3. While doing the above, also build pipeline to connect learners directly to jobs.
Feedback?
We want any and all feedback! Please send an email to chance@chingu.io or if you’re in Chingu already, please send me (@chance) a Direct Message in Discord.
p.s. bonus points if you recognize the homage in this article. ;p
