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Codecademy is rolling out a new set of pro memberships “to help anyone learn resume-ready skills to advance their career,” with the help of human instruction. The Codecademy Pro Suite comes with three different paid options: Pro, Pro Intensive, and Pro Mentors.
Photo: Codecademy.
Launched in 2011, the New York based startup Codecademy, started with the aim to close the growing skills gap between employers who wanted tech-literate employees and people who were eager to learn these skills but didn’t know where to start.
Zach Sims, Codecademy founder and CEO, wanted to build a new -free and online- learning experience that was engaging and interactive where learners could acquire new skills with a learn-by-doing approach.
Since its launch in 2011, Codecademy claims that 45 million people have registered to use its free product, making them “the largest platform teaching people technology skills to advance their careers.”
Yet, Codecademy is just a part of the large coding bootcamp industry. According to data from Course Report, the number of coding bootcamp graduates has grown 10x since the first bootcamps launched. Today, coding bootcamps are a $260 million industry and will graduate about 23,000 developers in 2017.
But despite its growing popularity, coding bootcamps are facing a crisis. This summer, two prominent coding bootcamps are closing because they couldn’t make their business models work. Codecademy itself faced a crisis in 2015 when the company was on the verge of closing unless it found a way to get at least some users to pay, according to a report by EdSurge.
Moreover, the high costs and difficult entry requirements -some bootcamps claim they are “harder to get into than Harvard”- that many in person coding bootcamps offer, are somehow being transformed into a new “Ivy League”.
With this panorama, Codecademy is rolling out a new set of products “to help anyone learn resume-ready skills to advance their career,” with the help of human instruction. The Codecademy Pro Suite has three tiers: Pro, Pro Intensive, and Pro Mentors.
- Pro, its cheaper version, consists of a monthly membership ($19.99) that includes a personalized learning plan that lets you track progress against key skills, live on-demand coding help from professional advisors, and provides extra practice including quizzes and projects that aren’t available in the free offering.
- Pro Intensive, 8-10 week long intensive programs designed to teach specific skills to help advance your career. Starting with two programs: Build Websites from Scratch and Build Front-End Apps, $199 each, provide help by real professional developers.
- Pro Mentors, gives users all the benefits of Pro and Intensive, plus weekly 30-minute live video sessions with a professional mentor, for $499.
Codecademy officials say that their free classes will remain on the site, hoping that this new pro options can help people upgrade their skills to enhance their current careers. In the future, the platform is aiming to link specific courses to specific skills within job postings.
Although Codecademy’s new strategy will not close the skills gap, it will surely pave the way to new alternatives to the college degree.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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