Two and a half years ago, we launched the project Otus.ru and I wrote . To say that I was wrong is an understatement. Today, I would like to summarize what we’ve achieved so far and share a bit about the project, including what’s going on behind the scenes. I’ll start with the mistakes mentioned in that article.
Is education about employment?
Not at all. For individuals looking to change professions, education is a means to secure employment. However, for those already working in their field, education serves as a path to becoming better at their jobs. As strange as it may sound, our students come to learn in order to be the best in their profession. Six months ago, we conducted a survey among our students, which numbered just under 2,500. We asked a simple question: why are you studying with us? Only 17% replied that their goal is to change jobs. The overwhelming majority of our colleagues are studying for personal development, to enhance their skills, and they are interested in new developments in their profession. This sentiment is indirectly supported by employment figures: we organized thousands of interviews, and only 350 of our students decided to change their jobs throughout the entire two and a half years of the project’s existence.
The second mistake we made was the assumption that we could actually facilitate employment. This is not the case. No educational center is an agent in the employment process. We cannot influence it or the myriad circumstances that lead to a job change. We’ve adjusted our strategy, and now we simply recommend our students to companies, while companies recommend their students to us. In a sense, we've become a media outlet in the IT job market, but without being intrusive. We currently have 68,000 clients (including both those who are studying and those who have completed their training or have not yet started). This accounts for about 12% of the entire Russian IT market. Additionally, over 300 companies collaborate with us, posting their job vacancies on our platform. However, even with this scale, it’s unlikely we could claim to be involved in employment. We merely help connect people with companies, and we do this for free.
One course – one instructor?
When we started, we had the idea that to create a cool course, all we needed was to find a good practitioner with extensive production experience and convince them to create the course. The course itself was just a transfer of their experience. I even had a metaphor for this: 'during the day, they build an application, and in the evening, they tell you about it.' I was very far from reality. It turned out that a course is a complex organism with different structures depending on the subject area. It turned out that, in addition to webinars (i.e., lectures), there should also be practical sessions (i.e., seminars) and homework assignments, as well as methodological materials and all that. It turned out that a team of instructors should work on the course simultaneously, that there are good lecturers, and there are seminar leaders, and there are assistants who check homework. It turned out they need to be taught, and they need to be taught differently. Finally, it turned out that finding these people and convincing them to teach is harder than finding and inviting them to the staff.
As a result, we created our own school. Yes, we established a school for teachers, teaching significantly more than remain with us. The teaching profession is challenging and energy-intensive, and only one in four of those who complete our training 'goes' to the audience. We found no better way to select teachers than to immerse them in the learning process. In one or two months of training, future teachers not only have to create their own course but also teach their classmates in practical sessions. Over the course of the project's existence, we have taught 650 people how to teach, of whom 155 are teaching our students.
Will we have many courses?
So, how many IT topics are there for training? Well, Java, C++, Python, JS. What else? Linux, PostgreSQL, Highload. Also DevOps, and automated testing can be a separate course. And that seems to be it. We were counting on this number of courses and hoped to have 20-40 people in a group. Life made its adjustments. So far, we have created 65 courses, or as we call them, products. We plan to double this in a year and a half. Once a month, we launch 4-6 new ones, "testing" the demand for technologies, programming languages, and tools. It's funny, but we still can't figure out why some courses take off while others don't. We followed a similar path to that of the teacher training school: we create a funnel and test demand "in action." Alongside this, we've significantly improved our group enrollment metrics: our largest group so far has 76 people, but we often gather 50 or more students. Of course, not everyone attends every class, but we provide the opportunity to watch them in recording.
Recently, we hit the milestone of 1,000 people. That is, at one moment, we are training over 1,000 students, conducting up to 25 classes a day at peak times. All this activity takes place on our platform, which we have been developing ourselves since the project's inception. Currently, a team of five people is working on it, and they are honestly overwhelmed with requests for new functionalities. We traditionally pay a lot of attention to the quality of education, collecting regular feedback from students. Over the past year, we have drastically improved our ratings, and now the average score for a class is 4.48 on a five-point scale (compared to 3.99 a year ago).
Where did I go wrong then? Probably in the core idea of the project. We are still inviting those who already have experience in the profession to train. We still conduct entrance testing to ensure that those who cannot handle the training can prepare for the course in advance. We are still inviting only practitioners to teach, who don’t waste time but provide specific and useful information. We continue to focus on practice, projects, products, and actively develop the community around us. Two and a half years ago, I couldn’t believe that anyone would buy course after course from us, and now it’s a fact: 482 people (about 13% of all students) have purchased more than one course, with a record-holder attending as many as 11. We still do not guarantee employment, do not promise to 'master a profession in two weeks', and do not entice with mythical salaries. And it’s very nice for us that here, on Habr, there are already more than 12,000 of you with us. Thank you and let’s stay in touch.
Source: habr.com
