BrainStation

I completed the 10 week UX design course at BrainStation virtually and received my certificate. This is a part-time course that also includes completing a UX portfolio project. I enjoyed having hands on experience with the project - it helped me to apply what we were learning in the class. This is definitely an introductory class. I would have appreciated more support with job assistance, for example having 1 class that was dedicated to how to build a UX portfolio that explained what else we should include aside from the one project we created in this class. 

It was a good course with current up to date information and the instructors know what they are talking about!

Last month I took the Social Media Marketing course at BrainStation. It was a 7 week online course that touched on many new and popular social media platforms. This course is great if you are an entrepreneur or looking to grow your skills within social media. 

On the whole, I was pretty disappointed with this course for how much I paid for it. I just finished it yesterday. 

• Class size was huge, which meant not a lot of time for questions
• The instructor is probably amazing at doing data analytics himself but found he could not clearly explain concepts 
• Multiple times per class I was told "you probably don't need to know this" or "you can just Google this"...so why am I paying over $2k for information I don't need or could figure out myself?
• Class felt a bit disorganized. While I realize a lot of schools are getting used to the digital thing, Brainstation has offered online courses for awhile, so I would expect it to be more ironed out. We spent about 15 minutes in last night's class watching the instructors discussing between each other how long people should have for presentations...the day we were supposed to do the presentations...when we had already been told we had 10 minutes to present. It just felt very disorganized and unprofessional. 
• Campus support was very unhelpful-- I had to miss a class due to a religious holiday and they offered no help in figuring out alternatives and simply told me I could miss up to 3 classes and still get the certificate. 
• When I spoke to a learning advisor and explained what I wanted to get out of the class, he assured me it would be a good fit for my role and function. However, I found the curriculum much more technical than expected. 3 classes on SQL, including advanced queries. To me, it feels like they need 2 streams of data analytics, one for those wanting to learn these technical skills, and one for professionals who want to understand the fundamentals, how to interact with data teams, and how to tell stories with data, but don't necessarily need advance technical skills.

I think if I had a different instructor, I would have had a better experience, as I have heard others say they enjoyed their Brainstation experience in the past. But based on the experience I just had, I would not take another course there. 

The online (virtual) Product Management 5-week course at BrainStation was a fantastic program that introduced you to the foundational knowledge of Product Management and it's real world application. Led by industry experts, the class focused on applying knowledge to real-world use and skills transference, having students share examples from their own school or work experience to understand concepts of Product Management methodology and process.

Despite being virtual, I found the class engaging and informative and was able to connect with my peers through regular break-out rooms for group activities. The instructors were lively and made an effort to get to know all the participants through break-out rooms and interactions. 

This class was a great way to develop skills and knowledge in the industry! I highly recommend it for anyone who is looking to learn more about Product Management and start a new career in the field.

BrainStation has a lot of work to do to make this program live up to all they sell it to be. It’s brand new, so I have hope they will get it right, but at this point, it’s not worth the money. Great instructors and good experience overall, but the pace was often frenetic, we glazed over topics, leaving very little time to develop technical skills (which is why most of us took it). Doesn’t touch on e-commerce or Amazon - weird, given today’s world. Also provided almost no actual support in making a career transition. You’re really left to figure it out on your own. 

I'm quite satisfied with my learning experience at BrainStation Vancouver campus. I took a 10-week Data Science course first then a Machine Learning course which is related. I had a Master's degree in Environmental Science and only a little coding (python) skill from self-learning which worked out fine. The instructor for both courses was Alireza. He has rich experience in the Data industry and co-founded his own company. He is very patient and provides first-hand experience and cases in the course. If you take this course I suggest spending some time previewing the learning materials before each class and try to ask more questions and initiate more interactions with the instructor and your classmates. That would enhance your learning experiences. Also it's a good opportunity to seek advice on a career change or promotion during the course.  

I completed the Product Management training at BrainStation with Michael Ayoola as the instructor. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to learn about product management. 

The course does a solid job at covering a broad set of PM topics while adopting a hands-on approach to learning through in-class exercises and projects. 

Micheal was incredible at summarizing the vast amount of information and bring complex concepts to life through his experiences. He made himself available to answer any questions outside class and provided additional references to anyone wanting to dive deeper into certain topics.

I also enjoyed the balance between presentations and learning from pointed discussions and the perspectives that my class mates raised during the class.

The biggest value that I personally got out from the course is the immediate application of the concepts I learned at work and seeing the utility and practicality of what I learned. 

It's a great class if you are starting out and trying to learn the basics of UX design. This is a beginner's course and if you already have some knowledge of UX, then it probably might be better to learn on your own or learning from a mentor. This course somewhat lacks of mentorship and you're often left in the dark. 

I found the course to be the equivalent of topics that are touched throughout first year of art school, except to all be condensed into a few weeks. This is great for those who are looking for hands-on experience in seeing whether UX is right for them, where they get to explore the fundamental theories and tools that are relevant to the current UX climate that's happening in the industry, as taught by industry-experienced instructors. However, I signed up with the expectation that this UXD course (2018) is the part-time version of their UXD full-time, which is actually a completely different program, and this explains why I'm only giving it 3/5 stars, where I was only borderline satisfied with my experience but disappointed that I was misled with the title of the program. I'm currently in the midst of taking their 2020 UXD full-time program, and the intensity, content, and practices are everything that I dreamed of. The part-time course consisted of a single mini project where the student went from paper prototyping to Sketch App.

Insightful instruction from leading digital marketing professionals. This course provides a great foundation to digital marketing, and covers social media, search, and email marketing. I didn’t have a marketing background, and was able to successfully navigate the course, thanks to the comprehensible material and excellent instruction from the professor.

The course I took was very informative. What I appreciated most was how informative the instructor was. Fran was always able to provide real examples from her personal experiences in the field which helped in providing clear and concise feedback. 

Really great overview of the tools required for the field. Gives you a sense of where you may like to further your education. 

I did a lot of research before picking a bootcamp. I believe they were the best priced, but I can definitely tell you that the course material, instructors and support staff were really wonderful. Honestly, I've rarely dealt with nicer people. This boot camp is a very good choice. 

Starting off I originally felt the first 2 weeks were way too easy and slow.. They really could of started off with just 1 week of the easy/everyone knows this material.  After that, it started to get really challenging.  I would say the projects made sense but after getting some feedback from other students who didn't finish some of their projects and somehow got a better mark then me that was something I figured was completely unfair.  Other than that, the course itself for 12 weeks was hard and challenged me beyond my limits that I thought weren't possible.  We lost 3-4 students during the first 4 weeks.. so this course is not for everyone! If you cannot keep up they won't do anything to help you.. You're basically on your own if you can't keep up that's it gotta drop out.

The teachers, we started off with 3 awesome teachers who teached me a lot! We were told by week 4 that we were losing 2 of our teachers (Who one works in SEO and week 5 we were doing SEO so that really sucked).  That was a game changer for me.. I felt like I was somewhat discouraged because of this.

After that, our final capstone which you will have to come up with your own brand idea (THE BIG IDEA).. was an amazing experience for myself creating a brand from a start-up position.  That was amazing to showcase it at the end of it all on DEMO day which is the single most important day of the course (At the end).

Now, let's talk about Demo Day.. first of all my whole course was online (Due to covid19).  We proposed our project infront of maybe 60-70 people and we were told with a 97% chance of hiring rate at the beginning of the course.  Yes 97%.... so after demo day all of my classmates (13 of them) not 1 of them got messaged by any recruiters!!!! This was the single most dissapointing thing ever as we waited 12 weeks for this.. and BrainStation said so many good things about it and that it would help our career development.. Well I'm still job searching 3+ weeks later and trying to get my foot in the door.  I do understand it's entirely on me to find a job but the whle " 97% hiring rate and we will help you get a job " kinda was false advertisement to be honest.

Take it like a grain of salt.. this course definitely is worth it I would say but don't expect much of getting help towards finding a job you're clearly on your own with that.

All in all, a very awesome course and 5/5 for classmates and teachers helping guide me through it.  I now hope I can find a job soon enough!! Take this course if you really feel you need the experience but don't expect much for help with job searching.. also the career deveolpment part was more or less a joke really.. they didn't help much for my resume at all!! Just gave me a template and told me some guidelines and post on it (1 review from it that's it.. over 12 week course)... and linkedin.. they just kinda said the DO's and DON'TS... No help in regards to actually doing your linkedin profle and what to say.. So I would say this course If I was to rate it out of 10.. I would give it an 8 out of 10.. if they can fix their problems with acutally helping out with linkedin profile and resume and getting recruiters to talk to us... Then it's a 10/10.

Thank you though for the experience and I will definitely recommend this to a friend if I want to.

I took an introductory UX design course with Brainstation and coming from a completely unrelated background (I work in finance) it was easy to follow and a lot of fun!

The course was in a small group setting and encouraged a lot of interaction between classmates. It was incredibly helpful to hear unique experiences and meet people from various backgrounds that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten the chance to meet. The content was valuable and gave me access to tools I wouldn't have otherwise discovered on my own. Although I took the course more for fun and wasn't considering a full on career change, I feel equipped with the right resources should I want to pursue something in UX/UI. Brainstation instructors were also great overall - they were friendly and always welcomed constructive, honest feedback.

Highly recommend!

Great little program to add to your resume but not if that’s what you want to do for your career. I knew that going in but a lot of students would take hours of class time just asking career questions and I felt time could have been used more appropriately to actually learn about the content at hand. I just feel like we could have learned more if time in class was used better. The structure wasn’t always clear at times either and could have been better. Prompt feedback on projects would have been nice too instead of waiting a week to find out that you have to redo everything you’ve been working on. I honestly feel like if the class size was smaller, it could have been a lot better. 

Disorganized programs. Disorganized administration.  TA's that don't have much knowledge of programming, but are highly opinionated about the industry when they have no experience in it. Instructors play favourites, and only help students that they like, and give one word answers or brush off completely the other ones. Save yourself the money and watch youtube videos to learn the same things or enrol in an actual college. There are claims in teaching "industry best practices" which is not entirely true. The instructor's behaviour is discriminatory. Example: I told him one teammate took credit for work I did and didn't let me present it, and he didn't even response. 
There were git commit history proving this. Now that person is hired as a TA. Which brings me back to my first point about TAs. They are the ones that are teacher's pets. But don't have actual knowledge, only repeat what they are told, and take credit on other people's work. DO NOT enrol in this program. You are better off enrolling in a college or university. Or even watching youtube tutorials.

Help to improve data analysis skills

If you are already a designer and proficient with adobe products, I think this will be a good course for you. They mainly teach theory and UX ideas, and jumping in with your design skills will be perfect. If you are not a designer or proficient in adobe products, you might have a hard time, I suggest brushing up on your design skils first before taking this course. The instructors are also great and have the industry knowledge to share in class.