Episode 104: Bridging the Gap Between College Degree and Dream Career With Benny Boas, Founder & CEO of Upright Education
Benny Boas is a Serial Education Entrepreneur. Benny is previously the Founder & CEO of Burlington Code Academy, an award-winning online coding Bootcamp, and is currently the Founder & CEO of Upright Education, a platform making it simple for colleges to launch and monetize their own Bootcamp programs that place students in high-demand tech jobs.
Why are bootcamps just as important as 4-year degrees or more than 4-year degrees?
Bootcamps are not a replacement for a 4-year degree. In some cases, they can be auxiliary or ancillary. In other cases, they actually can amplify opportunities for folks who have graduated from a 4-year institution or even into a master’s degree. Bootcamps are short, intensive programs that fast-track people into jobs. They are more workforce oriented and less academic. They are supposed to, in theory, teach the technical skills that employers need in the year or moment when they need them. These models have been quickly adopted in private for-profit companies. Having higher education institutions see these programs as non-competitive with current 4-year offerings and making sure that colleges understand that these programs are not only intensive for students, but they’re also intensive for providers. It takes a lot of money to build and they require a lot of resources and bodies to keep up the curriculum and sustain the curriculum over the course of changing and evolving technologies that influence the way that people get jobs.
How can a student who has not learned any technical skills as part of the college curriculum get credentials through Upright Education?
At Upright Education, they essentially make it really easy for colleges to white label their own bootcamps without needing to put money down or to pay for anything as well as to not have to worry about the enrolment minimum. They do not have to worry about sustaining a certain demand to keep the programs going. Upright Education provides the bootcamp in partnership with colleges to serve the local needs of the institutions. Their general market is not necessarily students graduating from high school. Their market is someone who might have already gotten a degree, been underemployment for 5 years, and wants to step into a career where there is earning potential as well as growth potential and also for people who have not completed their degree or even somebody who has not completed college but has 6 or 7 years of working experience and wants to move into a career. These learners have been working long enough in a job to realize that they do not like it, and they want to do something else.
Why is there still a gap in students pursuing tech jobs when they come out of higher education?
The easy answer is that STEM jobs are generally less popular among students that are pursuing higher education than other areas that are a bit broader. If you look at the degree confirming over the last few years, we see somewhere around 33% had been in business degrees whereas less than 4% has been in STEM. One of the things that are important to note is that alone you can see you would probably have fewer students who are interested in and enrolling in a coding bootcamp or a business program. That is a place e to start. Tech jobs actually open and expand the gamut of the type of skills that you need to enter your career. For example, you see that tech sales are a much lower technical and skill area than coding. Areas like these are much lower than coding. The problem is when there is talk about tech jobs, people associated it with technical skills like technology training and coding. The narrative that has to be rebuilt is that there are a lot of different types of employments within tech and bootcamps can train very well in those particular fields
Contact Benny Boas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-boas
Learn more about Upright Education
Email: partnerships@uprightled.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/upright-education
Twitter: https://twitter.com/uprightedu
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/upright_ed
Website: https://www.uprighted.com
Subscribe and listen to the podcast at IlluminateHigherEducation.com
This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, The iPaaS for Higher Education.
About N2N Services
Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.
N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.
Learn more at https://illuminateapp.com/web/higher-education/
Subscribe and listen to more episodes at IlluminateHigherEducation.com
