2022 was full of failed plans for us

Despite having opened new cohort and mysteriously announcing great new plans to expand and collaborate with our community, we failed.

1. At the start of the year we had great plans to move into the web3 space and help designers+programmers onboard projects in this exciting space. This year turned out to be a less exciting for the blockchain world, so both our partner and us decided it would be wise to sunset this initiative.
2. Since late last year, I reached out and announced new ways of collaborating with our small community. I wanted to open our doors to others willing to shape the design education world. This too failed and never moved forward.
3. At some point mid-year, I considered the option of creating an async program for those who wanted to explore our “Intro to UX” lessons at their own pace. After a lot of planning and preparation I stopped believing in this iniative and paused it.
4. And lastly, we’ve been failing in keeping you up-to-date. My personal disbelief in social media has made me move further away from almost every platform we previously worked hard to grow. Only our small Slack and mentoring sessions throughout the year have been fairly active as it’s where we still exchange job offers and help people out with info and career advice.

So that was a lot of failed attempts at evolving.

What’s next?

After 2 full-time programs and 3 remote programs (which I still consider as our most successful endeavours since 2017), we’re putting our learning programs on pause. The offer that spawned around the world since then is enormous and even though we would question the quality of most of these programs, we don’t want to compete in this who-screams-the-loudest-in-between-the-noise game.

I started a learning-focused TNDS with the clear vision of what the industry back in 2016 needed. But things have changed.

As we’ve been mostly helping people change careers, we can now clearly identify that starting a successful career is not just about having the right knowledge but rather about being able to enter the job world with the right conditions in place.

With that in mind, we’re looking into new projects we can help develop to help new designers make proof of their knowledge, as well as ways to lower the risk of hiring junior designers. The first idea on the table is a free-to-use internship blueprint for tech companies that doesn’t suck and takes into account needs from both sides.

At this point, I’ve been carelessly managing this blog and our social media so I don’t expect many of you to even have read this far, let alone to care about these things.

But if you do have your reasons to care and would like to discuss this or other ideas for a bit, DM me on LinkedIn and let’s talk.

Hope you have a wonderful start of 2023! 🎆