A Chat with Martin Ramsin, Founder and CEO at Online Tech School: CareerFoundry

CareerFoundry is a new kind of school for a new world of work. We help people change careers to digital professions enjoying flexibility, creativity and impact.

With 10-month online courses to change careers into tech, across full-stack web development, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, digital marketing and data analytics, CareerFoundry is designed to help people enter this new working world through a human-centric, entirely flexible approach.

An offline, synchronous, classroom-based educational model can no longer prepare people for the reality of the modern workplace, and CareerFoundry seeks to resolve that.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Inspiration for CareerFoundry stemmed from my own experience of learning how to code using an online tutorial. It was a lonely experience, and I thought to myself: why does learning online have to be so isolating? Why is it that learning offline in a classroom is with people, but when learning online you have to do it alone? I

decided to change that, and to make online learning feel more involved, and it is here that the idea for CareerFoundry was born. CareerFoundry has a unique dual mentorship model where every student is paired with an industry mentor to provide sector-specific insights, and a personal tutor who provides students with detailed feedback. In addition, each student gets a dedicated career specialist supporting them in the job seeking process.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
We started in 2014 with the idea of making online learning more human-centric, and we quickly realised those who needed our service the most were people seeking to change careers. It’s a scary thing to start all over, and people who dare to do so want a lot of support from industry professionals, which is what we offer. When we launched in 2014, we had more than half of our customers in the US, and it’s still true today.

Over the years, we added another goal. We felt that we had proven that online learning did not have to be lonely and now we wanted to prove that education can be both inclusive and effective. We designed CareerFoundry to help people enter the tech workforce by using a human-centric, entirely flexible approach that fits anyone and everyone’s schedule.

Today, over 50% of CareerFoundry course participants are women, 44% of students are working full-time, and 29% are caring for dependents. We are really proud of our diverse student pool and the outcomes that they achieve.

We now have 120 employees and over 800 instructors dotted across the world, providing five different career change courses (and there will be more on the way). To date, CareerFoundry has helped over 10,000 people across the globe change careers into tech, with their salaries on average increasing by £14,000 when compared to previous employment.
 

What can we hope to see from CareerFoundry in the future?

 
The big trend right now is remote work. The Covid pandemic made people realise how much they want the freedom to work on their own terms, and smart companies are now hiring remotely to get the best talent.

Looking into the future, I hope that CareerFoundry continues to help demographics that have historically been excluded from lucrative career paths in tech. Top talent is located across the entire world, however it is concerning just how remarkably different opportunities look in different parts of the world. This is also true within countries such as the US, where people have vastly different opportunities.

We want to find and help these talented individuals by equipping them with the necessary skills for the digital economy.