Reflecting On Five Years As Lighthouse Labs' CEO

In 2013, we started Lighthouse Labs as an experiment with a two-fold mission: to find the best ways to train the next generation of amazing developers, and to transform the way education is being delivered in the 21st century.

We’ve always aimed to create programs that provide our students with the skills that allow them to both find employment immediately after Bootcamp and set them up for successful careers where they continue to evolve along with the industry and the roles they grow into.

As a data-driven school, it should come as no surprise that capturing good quality and impactful data has always been one of our key priorities. The ability to draw meaningful conclusions about our students’ outcomes became integral to what we do as a school and how we measure success.

The four different goals we look to achieve in building our curriculums:

1. Excellent student experience, one that motivates, supports and challenges the wide range of individuals who walk through our doors
2. Helping people learn and love code, at least almost as much as we do
3. Getting graduates job-ready post-Bootcamp
4. Setting graduates up for long lasting job growth, where they can build a successful career as a developer

When considering the first two goals, student experience and love of code, we get that feedback while the students are in our space and learning with us. It's immediate, it’s plentiful and it allows for a great amount of adjustment. However, the latter two goals can only be truly validated through long-term data collection. Outcomes related to graduates’ career growth would have been impossible to answer without the consideration of time.

The ability to draw meaningful conclusions about our students’ outcomes became integral to what we do as a school and how we measure success.

While reporting on outcome numbers could be seen as explicitly for public consumption, promotional marketing or a decision-making influencer for students, for all of us who work here at Lighthouse Labs, this very data helps us validate the effectiveness of our efforts, our Bootcamp and has considerable implications on how we step forward into the next five years. Sharing this data holds all of us internally accountable in maintaining the high standards of expectations that we set out to achieve when we started this school. After all, as a mentor of mine once said, "making your work public is the most important step to getting honest feedback about the job you are doing, as groupthink is REAL."

We chose to release two reports at the five-year mark because it presented an opportunity to look at a much bigger body of data; helping clarify the role Bootcamps are playing in the lives of students and the overall tech sector’s success on a macro level.

It is our hope that these kinds of reports help start conversations around the potential of Bootcamp education.

The first report, our Five-Year Student Outcomes Report presents a cumulative snapshot of five years of data collection, more than 1,500 graduates and 992 job-seeking graduates. It demonstrates not only the consistency in which students have been employed post-Bootcamp, but also the role jobs play in decision-making to join our programs in the first place. It examines their post-graduation career outcomes including employment rates, length of time between graduation and employment as well as average graduate salary. We are fiercely proud of the numbers: 923 graduates that represent 93% of our job-seeking graduates getting jobs within 120 days of graduation. The consistency of this outcome year over year with a growing number of graduates was something that five years ago could not have been predicted - making it an important mark of validation for Lighthouse Labs and our mission.

The second report is the Lighthouse Labs Career Trajectory Report. It is the first of its kind for the entire Bootcamp industry and tracks how alumni who graduated from Lighthouse Labs more than three years ago are progressing in their careers, from salary growth to the roles they now occupy. The report aims to clarify the role Bootcamps play in the lives and careers of students and the overall tech sector’s success on a macro level. It is our hope that these kinds of reports help start conversations around the potential of Bootcamp education. We care about our students, their learning journeys and Canada’s tech community tremendously. For those reasons, we’ve chosen to publish these reports. It is our commitment that these two reports will be informing our decisions and programs going forward and we are thrilled to share them with you.

Yours,

Jeremy Shaki,

CEO, Lighthouse Labs