Creating the Firehose Job Preparation Course

Role: Product Manager, Designer, and Marketer
Team: Remote Developer, Marketing Director
Duration: 5 months (Aug–Dec 2016)

Challenge

Firehose Project is an online learning platform for people who want to learn a new skill or professional trade. The typical Firehose student comes from a non-technical industry or role and is seeking a transition into a career in web development.

Given their background, students are typically unfamiliar with the process of applying and interviewing for technical roles. This lack of knowledge led to frustration in the post-graduation experience and low job placement rates. The resounding feedback we heard from students, their mentors, and our internal team was that students felt overwhelmed and unprepared to begin pursuing these roles, despite possessing adequate skills for the workforce.

As a bootstrapped company, financial and people resources were hard constraints. As much as we wanted (and tried) to work with every student looking for a job, we turned our attention to more scalable solutions to this problem.

Process

Research  →  Ideate  →  Prototype  →  Test  →  Iterate

To identify and dig into the most critical needs and frustrations of students, we first spoke to recent graduates and students nearing graduation to get a sense for their thoughts and feelings, the challenges they were facing, and where opportunities for us to help lied. We then compiled these insights with our data on each student’s background and goals.

Then, we worked with our student support team to get additional insight and a different perspective, and together we ideated on how we might be able to use existing resources to meet student needs and relieve some key frustrations.

We then prototyped a post-graduation book to be provided to students on graduation day. The book contained our most popular blog posts and internal support materials, edited and presented to help students self-guide through the emotions and logistics of searching for job post-graduation. We started testing the prototype by distributing the book to a selected group of students.

The feedback we received was immediately positive, but upon receiving the book, many students also expressed that they needed to find time to read through the content before being able to share their feedback with us. Unsurprisingly, those who did follow through on reading it often took several weeks. This was an early indication to us that even though the content was extremely relevant and useful to students and the challenges they were facing, there were inherent usability challenges with the book format.

Solution

It was clear the content we were providing was valuable, so while we continued to distribute the book to students on their graduation day, we returned to the root problem to reconsider the user experience in the next iteration of our solution.

We heard from students that time was their key concern with using this new resource alongside an already intensive program. By building the content into the platform as a course in itself, we believed we could help students access the same material in a much more intuitive and flexible way.

Students could also begin to access the materials prior to completing the program, and use its contents at their own discretion based on their personal goals and needs. Luckily, a few of the folks on our internal team were early graduates of the program, and offered uniquely intimate insights on how to integrate the course into the program.

The success of the first version of this course led us to develop a second iteration with additional modules of content from industry experts and partners, including BrandYourself—the online reputation management company as seen on Shark Tank. This version was officially launched to all students and announced to the public.

Traction

Post-launch, the course saw 53% active usage, with active users being defined as students qualified to access the course who completed 10% or more of the curriculum.

Additionally, in the six months post-launch, our graduate job placement rates increased to become competitive with the industry standard. (For reference, 53.6% of graduates got a job within 3 months of graduating, and 82.1% got a job within 6 months for Thinkful's competitor program during the same reporting period.)