Has anyone taken the UX immersive 8 week program at General Assembly in NYC? Did it help you get a job as a UX professional? I’m thinking about taking the class and transitioning from marketing to UX.

Anonymous

Hello prospective UXDi student! Unfortunately I don't have a short answer for you. I do have a lot of information though if you're seriously considering the program, so I hope you humor me a little.

Just to give you some context: I am a (pretty recent) graduate of the UXDi in NYC. The course is now 10 weeks instead of 8, and in those 2 weeks they've added 1 week of visual design and 1 week of front-end. Both are extremely basic.

Let me start by saying that GA markets itself as providing the skills to make you a minimum viable UX designer, and get you hired so that you can gain real experience. They don't promise a dream job out of the gate, they don't promise to make you a UX pro. They promise the basic set of skills, the opportunity to build up a portfolio to get you started, a hiring network, and the 93% chance of getting an industry job 3 months after graduating.

The Good News:

1) I received several competitive job offers within a month of graduating, didn't have to apprentice/intern at all, and I'm fully employed as a user experience designer in what is pretty much my dream job. I work on a project I love every single day, and I'm not a 'wireframe monkey'. I do extensive research and usability testing, steer project strategy, and also do wireframing and prototyping.

2) Unlike what others have said, I did not have a background in visual design OR coding. That being said, I am naturally interested in good design, and out of curiosity I have taken HTML/CSS and Javascript short courses on Codecademy, but am by no means fluent in any programming language. Before UXDi, I was in a completely unrelated field.

3) I was happy to find that my instructors are pretty awesome and experienced in the field, and that the curriculum is very thoughtful and genuinely did arm you with a great understanding of the user-centered design process. The projects they set up are fantastic and provided a great way for you to apply your newly-acquired knowledge, and the client project at the end of the course was extremely helpful for preparing us for real client work. I came out of there knowing how to use Sketch, Omnigraffle, Axure, and a variety of other tools that have continued to be immensely helpful in my short career. I really love how UXDi balances a very portfolio-oriented approach with theoretical knowledge.

4) UXDi is the strongest program they offer at GA. UX itself is a hugely growing market (there are many, many opportunities out there), and there aren't that many UX bootcamp competitors (yet). UX designers have all sorts of origin-stories, and at the moment you do not need formal education to be a successful designer. (In contrast, WDi is competing with a really saturated bootcamp dev market, and GA does not offer a very competitive course. The Product Manager immersive that recently started has even bigger problems - ~2 out of 25 students, 2 months after graduation, are hired. That program needs a lot of work.)

The Bad News:

My experience seems to be unique. Many, many of my fellow classmates are still unemployed. The course offers many positives, but for now, let me name the negatives and let you weigh the experience for yourself.

1) Like many have said, the admissions team of GA seems to have one criteria in mind, and only one: have the money to pay for the course. That's it. It sounds mean, but I have classmates that should not have been accepted into the program based on their lack of interest/realistic expectations alone. Some of them barely paid attention to the instructors throughout the course, or were deadweights on partner or group projects.  There should be actual standards in place for admission, or GA should have the guts to "fire" students who aren't trying hard enough - thereby incentivizing students to keep motivated and keep competitive, and strengthening the GA brand.

2) Because of point #1, there are a lot of mediocre students who graduate and proceed to flood the entry-level market with very average portfolios and a poor grasp of UX, relying on nothing more than what GA has taught them to get a job. All of these things really stain GA's reputation. Things my classmates and I have heard through the hiring process: that GA grads are everywhere and aren't impressive, and that while GA grads have a "good UX toolkit", they often lack the insights / maturity to know when to use individual tools.

3) The quality of your education is largely dependent on how good your instructor is. I've definitely heard a few instructor horror stories. I was lucky to have a few good ones, but it could have easily gone the other way.

4) The much-toted "93% hire rate" is certainly not true for my class. A few have been hired, some for even fantastic companies, but most of them have been struggling to get even internships or (genuine UX) freelance projects. Some have just gone back to their old companies with an added UX skillset. In the same vein, the  Apprenticeship Program is often spoken about as a lovely safety net, but during our course, no one would answer any questions about it. We were told that "errmmm... while it is an option, you first have to find companies willing to hire you but that have admitted they don't have the money to do so, and then they have to contact us, and then there will be a discussion, and yeah, I think that's how it goes. But don't depend on it." Kudos to other classes that have been able to avail of this program, but for now, it seems to be a fairytale for us.

5) Post-course, you're basically on your own. The outcomes program is pretty much a joke. As mentioned in previous posts, the much-heralded Meet-and-Greet is poorly-attended. The best companies already ask GA about their best students, and contact them separately. If you think that you'll meet your future company at their organized hiring event, you are very sadly mistaken. Instructors who were your best friends during the course are too busy planning their next course and/or working on their own side projects to help you in any meaningful way.

6) Lastly, GA seems to be intent on reckless and exponential expansion. UXDi has 2 classes, and WDi has 4 classes, each semester. This doesn't take into account the other part-time courses. Combined with lack of admissions standards, the graduation rate only appears to make things increasingly hard for each graduating batch.

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I've thought long and hard for a couple of months about tips I can give you to make sure you aren't just quitting your job and wasting $9,500, and this is it:

1) Test your passion for the field. UX sounds great, I agree, and everyone is attracted to [their perception of] "the startup / tech life". That doesn't mean that UX is for you, and the best way to figure out if it is, is to put in the work up-front. It's good that you're already on Quora, but read everything you can online about UX. There are touchstone books, medium posts by industry heavyweights, and constant meetups and talks. GA teaches you some of this stuff, of course, but what they do best is give you a holistic understanding - you still need to fill in a lot of the thought processes and heuristics yourself, so do it in advance. Live it, tweet about it, blog about it. Immerse yourself in the industry as much as you expect to in the course. Be interested. And, of course, don't join UX if you're only looking for a change and 'don't know where else to go'/because you heard that UX is the cool new thing to do/because you've heard UX has a low-barrier to entry/because you want to tell your friends you work for a cool start-up with a pingpong table.

2) Be willing to work your ass off. Be willing to learn anything, and everything. Not a visual designer? Take an online class on Photoshop. Volunteer to do wireframe design on your next project. Learn from a visual designer classmate. Don't know any front-end? Do a few Codeacademy courses. They're free. Plan a weekend HTML/CSS project and actually do it. During the course, learn from every project you do. See your classmate do something awesome in their project? Learn from it. Do it. Make it better. Being able to be a flexible and industrious is what will make you interesting to hiring companies. Why? Because the industry changes all the time. There are always new research, wireframing or prototyping tools and methods to use, and the best UX designers have the interest to learn them and keep learning.

3) Network. Like. HELL. The most amazing thing about the UX field is that is extremely flat and transparent. Go to the dozens of meet-ups happening at any given time. Make friends with designers, developers and PMs. Tweeting at UX titans will most likely get a response from them. Contact awesome UXers working out there and take them out to coffee, pick their brains - not because you want to weasel a job out of them, but because you believe that knowledge doesn't come exclusively from books, so that every meeting is a learning opportunity, and because you understand that you can only get better.

In the end, UXDi gives you the steps of the user-centered design process and trains you on the current tools, but you'll have to form a body of knowledge and a UX mindset all on your own to understand when to use a certain tool over another and when shifting your steps just might give you the most optimal outcome. In this case, a lot of your success weighs on you, and you alone. That is certainly not a bad thing, but it isn't what GA promises. Understand that there may be odds stacked against you. But if you want it, if you're passionate, then GA may very well be the place that changes your life. It did for me.

Andre Plaut and GA staff, if you're reading this - Please, please, PLEASE reconsider how you're running these immersive programs. If you keep expanding at the pace you are, without creating admission / graduation standards, you will do all the graduates and current students a huge disservice, and wasted all the effort you've put in to creating a great program.

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