Bloc Year Six: What We’ve Learned

Bloc co-founders Roshan Choxi and Dave Paola. And our old logo.

Bloc is the oldest, biggest and best (I’m biased) online coding and design bootcamp in the world. We’ve had over 5,000 enrolled students, and we’ve learned a ton over the years. On our sixth anniversary (thanks Dave and Roshan!), I wanted to share some of our most important lessons:

1. Skills Matters More than Degrees. Every week, Bloc graduates get jobs in the tech sector and share their stories of success, so we know our model of education is already working (a 97% success rate!). Over the past five years, we’ve also discovered that a growing number of employers are more interested in skills than degrees when it comes to hiring. They are looking for graduates with specific skills and more importantly, with the discipline and mindset needed to keep learning over time. More and more students each year are finding that demonstrated proficiency matters more than the signaling value of many 4-year degrees.
2. Continuous Learning is the Future of Education. Tech moves fast and workers need to adapt to remain relevant. Long gone is the era when one could train for a career and expect to organically acquire any additional knowledge on the job. We train students for their first job as a Web Developer or Designer, and to respond to the changing nature of work, we’ll also offer new courses to help tech workers level up as their industries continue to evolve.
3. Flexibility is accessibility. People have busy and complex lives and placing rigid constraints on when, where, and how people learn is an antiquated notion. We have the Internet now, and education should be much better because of it. Learning can now adapt to students’ lives and not the other way around. We have always recognized this fact, and it’s why Bloc operates online rather than on-premise like the vast majority of coding bootcamps. Over time, Bloc has found more ways to support students to help them push through challenges whenever they encounter them in their program without a dependency on physical presence.
4. Students Aren’t Customers. They are people with busy lives and dreams and families and personalities, and we’ve always striven to put our students’ interest first. As a business, we are unapologetically for-profit, but we also know that every Bloc student has their own bottom line and Bloc has to work for them. This is why our students’ return on investment is ultimately how we measure the success of our programs. In short, if our students are investing in their education but not seeing real results — higher compensation in a rewarding tech career — we simply aren’t doing our job. That’s why we pioneered the first-ever tuition reimbursement guarantee back in 2015.
5. Mentors Matter. When you’re learning a new trade, you don’t yet know what you don’t know, and you don’t yet know what’s important. This is why mentors matter. Mentors are essential to helping learners understand the macro-level challenges of their profession and establish the best practices needed to do consistently good work. Time and time again, Bloc graduates remark that their mentor was an invaluable sounding board on their learning journey.
6. Students Need More Than A Mentor. Bloc pioneered the “digital apprenticeship” model, but we’ve found students need more help than an hour or two from a mentor each week. So we’ve continued to bolster our programs to offer quick responses and instructional depth with a combination of formats to meet those highly varied student needs, day and night.

I recently had an opportunity to talk with Course Report about these lessons and how they’ve led to big improvements in the programs we offer:

So here’s to big things in 2018 and even more lessons to make education better still in the years to come.