General Assembly

Hello, I want to take the time to recommend the online trainings with GA. I participated in a 6 day course in Product Management. GA provided three instructors, all currently working in this job in different types of companies. The course included a high... Read More number of exercises in small groups and opportunities for group discussions. The number of instructors allowed them to support us during the exercises in small groups directly. My favorite part was the exchange of experiences with people from different professional backgrounds from African fintech startup to German heavy industry.

As I said in the title this course is simply fantastic. It is well structured with a project that you work on along side learning the theory. This really embeds what your learning and gives you a solid foundation to understand Product Management. Course... Read More content that was provided is also really useful to take away. I did this course via distance learning and although it is an intense week, all the tools provided worked well and I never felt I was missing out. I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to work in Product management.

From the admissions/sign-up support through to the course and beyond, the support offered really stuck out to me. GA go above and beyond to help you feel confident and comfortable, and help you get to your goals with the least amount of friction as possible.... Read More Everything is done professionally, thoroughly, and lovingly. Completed the 1-week Data Analytics course recently and it was well worth the money.

The program was great for support but having a chronic illness and doing 50 to 60 hours of computer work a week took its toll on my physical health which was the only con. They should have a personal plan with people who disclose chronic conditions and... Read More need the help with course extensions (just my personal opinion) but other than that it was an amazing experience!

General Assembly's Product Management course is one of the best career investments I have made. My instructor was well educated in their areas of expertise. There were a lot of discussions, critical thinking, and time to make our final projects spotless.... Read More My class was full of bright and ambitious individuals who were experts in their respective fields. We were able to connect ideas quickly and easily from the beginning of the course to the end. I was part of a week-long immersive class, and I thought this was best for my learning style. I reviewed the class content the day before and felt prepared for what I was about to learn. The class had homework supplemental to the course, which helped reinforce what we learned in class. I wish I knew more about how to interview for a product manager role and how to share my resume to be ready for a product manager position. Beyond that, I loved my experience with GA's PDM course. I look forward to taking other courses with General Assembly in the future.

I went into General Assembly thinking I probably couldn't code. Weird, right? A lot of money and time riding on the fact that I didn't think I would be able to do it, but after reviewing and doing a lot of researching all signs indicated that General... Read More Assembly would teach me how to do it. All of these were 100% correct. The precourse work really put it to the test, was I able to do this? And the assessment was a sort of stop gap; don't pass, probably not for you. Pass, and it's sink or swim, but everyone at GA, even your peers, will make sure that you swim. I really enjoyed this course, really a lot. They start off somewhat easy, and then from there it's into the deep end. The pace of the course is pretty breakneck, it's a whirlwind of information, but if you stick with it you will just be all that better at the end and doing things that you never thought you would imagine (I never thought I would make three functional apps before the course, but now after I'm getting ready to deploy them). All in all, it was an amazing experience, and I graduated with a cohort of wonderful people. The instructors are amazing as well, very patient, willing to explain, and the TAs are the same! I strongly, highly, recommend this course to anyone thinking about taking the plunge. The post-grad career support is great as well!

GA have taken on an interesting model of education. They focus on job skills to help people find jobs that sound okay on paper but is horribly lacking in educational standards and values. It is basically an internship you pay to do for a nonexistent employer.... Read More Fine for the unemployed. The courses are best contextualized as an on the job experience where the learning undertaken involves listening to 2 hr lectures from industry professionals who then assign a major project and then "new employees" complete the project. There is nothing wrong with this model on paper, but as there are no learning objectives, well developer curricula, or teaching methodology married with this approach, it basically becomes a manager walking a new employee through how to complete a task. If this was to be done fairly, the price point needs to change. Without any formal qualifications required for instructors, random industry professionals control the class, and they dictate and determine how the class would be delivered with major inconsistencies in the way courses are delivered. As anyone who has experience in the education industry can imagine, this leads to many issues in the integrity of an education institution.

I've done the week long intensive for both UX and Product Management (through their Sydney Campus) and can highly recommend both for anyone looking for a crash course in either of these areas. I found the UX course incredibly valuable - I had done plenty... Read More of web design work but had never specifically learnt UX. Our trainer was fantastic. He was passionate and very experienced in the field so was able to provide plenty of insight and advice through his own experience. The content was great and was grounded in plenty of hands on practical work both individually and as a team. I was looking to change careers and through doing this course I gained the experience and knowledge I needed to land a job as an Associate PM. The PM course I did after some time in my new PM role so I came in with a few months experience. Our trainer was great and the content was a good overview of the role of a PM but I didn't get nearly as much out of it as I did with the UX course. There is a lot of overlap between the PM and UX content so I would advise against doing both. The PM course was a good way of bringing together and solidifying everything I had learnt at my new job but it didn't go nearly as in-depth as I would have liked. It would have been much more valuable had I done it one month into the role. Who are these courses for: - People who desire to change careers and have a small amount of knowledge about the role and are wanting a good introduction. You will not get a job based on this course alone and will need to ensure you have supplementary experience on your resume to back you up. - People established in a different role looking to gain some knowledge to enhance what they're currently doing. If you're happy with your current career pathway but are looking to gain some quick skills/knowledge, these courses will be great. Who this is NOT for: - If you're already in the specific role you're intending to study, ROI drops off very quickly with every passing week/month. Unless you're struggling, I wouldn't bother. The hands on experience you're already getting is likely enough. - If you've got ZERO experience/knowledge/understanding regarding the role or related industry I would suggest going off and doing your own self guided research first. You'll get way more out of the trainers and content if you've got some baseline knowledge. 1 week vs 10 week course: For both of these I did the 1 week course as it was best for my situation. If you're someone who is seriously looking at changing careers I highly suggest doing the 10-week option. Having time to work on your major project; to digest the content; to do your own supplementary research; to ask your trainer questions etc will work greatly in your favour. The 1-week option will potentially feel rushed and shallow although still valuable.

Great knowledge of the instructors and extremely valuable content, covering a lot of the topics that are most important and required in the data science field. Extremely fast paced and hard work but very rewarding in the end. I would recommend to have... Read More some skills and programming knowledge before attending the course as it would be very valuable but is possible to complete if you put in the hard work.

So first and foremost, please please please understand that General Assembly is a BUSINESS. They are not a school and not a university. They are a for-profit company whose goal above all else is that keep you from dropping out so that they can collect... Read More and cash your tuition checks. And to achieve that goal, they will tell you pretty much anything before and during the course.

You will be exposed to everything in the Software Engineering Immersive bootcamp (multiple coding languages, multiple frameworks, front end + back end) but you will not master any of these things, you will not be good at any of these things, you wont even be competent at any of these things by the time you finish the bootcamp. I would say that at the completion of the GA Software Engineering Immersive you are 60% of the way to the starting line of being able to apply for jobs. You are looking at a MINIMUM of 6 months of work on your own, after you finish the bootcamp, before you are ready to apply for dev jobs. I had 14 students in my bootcamp and 12 months after finishing, 1 had a job. And that 1 developer had previously worked doing HTML / CSS, so he had experience, and the job that landed was doing more HTML / CSS.

DO NOT believe the graduation and job placements stats that they tell you. They do everything that they possibly can to disqualify you from "graduating" so that they don't have to count you in their job placement statistics. If you are 1 minute late to class more than 3 times over the 3 month bootcamp, you don't "graduate" and you don't get counted in the job placement states. After finishing the bootcamp, if you miss a class with the career services people, you don't graduate. If you don't finish a single homework on time, you don't graduate. Out of the 14 students in my bootcamp, 3 ended up "graduating" even though we all finished the course, we were there on the last day, did all the projects, and finished all the homework. GA's graduation statistics are a farce and they do everything they can to juice those stats. Oh and if you don't "graduate" the career development department will smile as they refuse to lift a finger to help you get a job. After paying $15k for the bootcamp.

For the course itself, you get exposed to lots of development principles, and lots of areas of development. The instructors are competent but they also refuse to answer most questions under the guise that "you learn better if you figure it out yourself." Yeah that gets frustrating when you are paying $15k for their instruction. At the end of the bootcamp and after paying $15k, you will be months of work away from being able to apply for a job, you wont have any of the skills to be able to build anything on your own, you likely will have zero support from career services, and you will feel like you got scammed. I regret taking General Assembly's Software Engineering Immersive