Springboard

I enrolled in the Data Analytics Career Track in April 2022. As a working mother, it was important that I had a structured curriculum while also having the flexibility to learn when I had the time. I had some experience in Data Analytics before joining this course, but there was so much offered in the DACT, that I now feel extremely confident when calling myself a Data Analyst. In addition to the learning material, I really enjoyed the mentor portion. Not only did this help keep me accountable and on track with learning, but it also gave me the confidence I needed in the job search process. 

Springboard does a great job introducing new people to the basic cirriculum to the UX Field. It's a 6 - 9 month extensive program and has a lot of content compared to other bootcamps. It also comes with a job garuntee program and a personal mentor but it doesn't mean that you are getting a job without hard work. The only things that stood out as a downside for me personally was only meeting your mentor for 30 minutes to go over your week worth of work and I also found kinda dissapointing was most of the resources provided were online articles (meaning you could do this yourself). Overall great other than those two things listed. You create a portfolio and are able to connect with industry grtoups to gain real life experience. 

While the program is sometimes frustrating in how understated some of the prompts are, it is overall a great experience. With the help of Springboard, I feel ready to actually switch industries and careers. I started looking for something new due to health issues and Springboard came recommended to me, both because of the creative side of things and because of the ability of the course to help a career change.

I would say the curriculum needs a little fine-tuning -- I was enrolled for three months when the curriculum was changed, causing some of my previous work to be made useless and actually to disappear from the necessary curriculum. Despite this, I have finished my program and am currently waiting for my certificate.

I like the fact that this Bootcamp taught two languages. It gives me more confidence to pick up new programming tools. It was also great to work with my mentor. It made a huge difference to work with someone who is patient and strict at the same time. I improved a lot. 

The course was well planned out and I learned a lot, especially as I was changing careers from something very different. The career help was one of the stand outs to me, the career coach's were excellent. I did experience some scheduling issues with my mentor though.

Springboard not only gave me the opportunity to develop industry skills but also build a UX/UI design network so that by the time I graduated my circle gave me leads on potential employers.

With this course  learned what Data Science is all about. Before taking it, I enrolled and completed around 15 MOOCs and always felt confused on how to start applying my gained knowledge. With Springboard, I was able to join all the dots together and mastered top notch technologies and methodologies for that. Great technologies used for Data Science, absolutely emailing mentorship from industry experts while doing the capstone projects, incredible career coaches during the job hunt and a very welcoming, warm and helpful community. There are some missing topics in the curriculum that would have been nice to have like more SQL practice and DB administration, introduction to NoSQL, cloud computing and software engineering concept for model deployment. So, a huge recommendation would be to make this a yearly program and trying to include those topics as well.

1:1 expert mentor oversight with weekly meetings is a massive advantage of this program. I loved being able to bounce thoughts and ideas off of my expert mentor regarding projects, concepts, job interviews, and design theory. Participating in the IDP was a fantastic way to get acquainted with the industry. The curriculum was fantastic, and the additional learning opportunities were vast. It was a great experience, and I feel thoroughly prepared to enter the job market.

I completed an online search of the best boot camps and landed on Springboard. After careful research on their website and student review platforms I decided to move forward an applied. From the initial phone contact for an interview to the last day of my program completion, the professionalism and support has been a wonderful experience. The curriculum is well thought out, a perfect balance of new material to learn and incorporate your previous career experience. 

I signed up for the UI/UX Design Career Track at Springboard in February of 2022, and just finished the course this November. I really enjoyed my experience working through this course. Although I am used to learning in person, this course does a great job to provide personalized videos and chooses magazine articles that make you feel like you're in a classroom. There are tons of resources available built into the curriculum and a slew of mentors/coaches to talk to at the drop of a hat. Not only are you paired with an industry professional mentor, but you also have the opportunity to book an additional call with on-demand mentors and book calls with career coaches that can help you throughout the course. The course is built to allow you to build out your portfolio and experience mock interviews for when you'll interview for a job. The coaches and mentors offer great feedback. At the end of the course you'll have the opportunity to work on a real life industry design problem with a few other Springboard students. Coming from a non-UI/UX background, I do truly feel like I learned a lot and have the resources to go back and explore the curriculum at any time if I wanted to. I think the feedback I received during the course was super helpful too. All in all I wouldn't change a thing about my experience, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn UI/UX Design.

If you are like me and are coming into the Data Science/Data Analytics field from a business background, I can wholeheartedly recommend Springboard. Their Business Insider track is the perfect mechanism for learning the skills you need while leveraging your business acumen and domain knowledge to get a job in the data field. 
The insight that the career coaches and mentors shared was priceless. I learned so many things that I would never have known through self-study or even through a master's program. 

Pros: The course is generally complete and helps people with no UI or UX foundation to reach the entry-level of the industry. Valuable are the weekly one-on-one meetings with mentors, mock interviews for careers, and the industry internship program. By completing the course, you will have a portfolio website and interview skills to find a job.

Cons: Most of the curriculum is a collection of articles from other websites, and some of the articles in the chapters are somewhat repetitive. The industry internship program is a bit of a test of luck, as you can get a great internship experience to put in your portfolio if you are matched with a nice company and teammates. If you are matched with a less organized company and teammates, you will get "real work experience."

Overall, I highly recommend the Springboard course for people who procrastinate and don't want to spend a lot of time looking for resources on their own. 

Springboard data analytics course is amazing. The course work is laid out well and they offer so many resources to help you finish the course. The best part of the course was the mentors. My mentor was so good at helping me when I was stuck and help me understand concepts and would give feedback like the real world. The course offers so much and I am really happy with my experience with them.

Overall I had a great experience with Springboard and I recommend it to people who work full time/have other obligations, but want to pursue a certification like this. I did the UI UX Design Career track and I finished in 10 months. It's advertised as 9 months but I took a vacation in the middle. So I do think the way it's advertised, is an accurate length of time to complete it as long as you are motivated and doing the work. I have a job at a tech company and I've been able to do some design work for them already (I told them I was enrolled in the bootcamp). I also did a take-home design challenge for this company so that they would be able to gauge if I was ready to be a designer. They said verbatim, that the bootcamp is working. So the curriculum is definitely teaching good things.  I love the structure of it because it's all remote, you don't need to be online at specific times necessarily so you can go at your own pace and watch videos/read articles to learn. You meet with a mentor once a week. But you can always get other mentorship on-demand from other mentors. Overall each bootcamp is just like anything else - you need to work hard and practice to get good at something. If you aren't motivated you won't do well. The curriculum teaches you the basics of everything you need to know. But if you don't actually practice the skills you won't do well. I've seen some great portfolios and some bad ones - you need to do the work if you want to get a job after. I think Springboard preps students very well overall. But you need to do the work.  PROS

Fully remote - great for people like me who also work full time and want to pursue another career.Industry Design Project - This was what made me choose springboard. They pair you with a real company for one month and you do real design work with that company. This comes with many real world challenges so it does prepare you for things you'll face in a real job. I had a great experience during mine, and I was paired with a very nice startup company. However, there were multiple challenges that I didn't really see coming and this is super important to actually prep you for the real world. Very valuable experience.

CONS

Now that I've done real design work for a company I feel that I can speak to this more: I wish the curriculum focused more on design systems, perhaps making students use a specific design system such as Material UI for a capstone project. In the real world you will usually be using the company's design system anyway, not making components from scratch. The curriculum does not really teach this, just gives a very brief overview of what design systems are. Figma - some students complained that the curriculum doesn't teach you how to use a tool like Figma. They point you to youtube videos. I can see how this might be challenging for some students but in the real world you will need to learn on your own anyway at a company. So I don't think this is much of a con. Just something to be aware of. I learned Figma through a mentor and youtube videos. On demand mentorship - It's great that you can get additional mentorship outside of the mentor that is assigned to you. However it's not truly 'on demand' in the sense that it's not same day, or next day. They book up quickly so you might end up scheduling an on-demand mentor call 2 weeks in advance or something. 

The curriculum is very broad. I think that you really can get a very good idea of what means to be a Data Scientist. The material is designed for any person with any type of background to understand it clearly. 

Additionally, I think that the support from mentors, community, advisors, etc. is wonderful to guide you in the correct pathway to succeed.

Lastly, the amount and insight of all the projects help a lot to solidify the knowledge that you learn.
Plus you have access for life to the resources!!

Springboard is an amazing way to change careers into the data world. Their mentor program, career coaches, and curriculum are top notch! I felt prepared and well equipped for a new job I had no experience in prior to Springboard. I HIGHLY recommend this program if you want to jump into the data world and have no prior experience. 

I took 2 weeks to research the different paths to take to get into UX Design & UX Research.  Springboard was to only one that had everything I was looking for.  It is 9+ months long so you get a well rounded education.  They provide you with a weekly mentor meetings plus unlimited mentors if you have questions outside of your weekly mentor meeting, you meet with career coaches and you have your work verified by a hiring manager.  The 4 portfolio case studies include a real world project to set you up for success when you go through the job search.  The payment options make it easy for people who are on a budget as well.  It's no wonder companies like Amazon are partnering with Springboard, it is honestly the best choice. 

I found the Springboard program to be an amazing resource for me. As a professional graphic designer prior to expanding into the field of UX/UI design by way of the bootcamp, I found myself learning many new things that I had not previously learned in school.  The mentors and career coaches were also great highlights of the program as well. They were very helpful and instrumental in my success. I highly recommend this program to anyone who is looking for a good bootcamp program. 

A big reason I chose Springboard was for the mentorship they offer. My mentor (who is an experienced UX designer) was nothing but supportive and encouraging throughout. I have heard of other students with mentors that they didn’t have a great experience with. However, Springboard has a VERY responsive support team, and I’m sure they’d be quick to act on that if it’s ever brought up. They are very friendly and accommodating. Mentor meetings occur once a week, and my mentor gave me feedback on my four projects, job advice, my portfolio, and more. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without a mentor.

In addition, we had career coach calls with recruiters in the tech industry that were really educational as well. I feel more of these could have been beneficial for us, but I also haven’t experienced any of the post-completion coach calls, which are every two weeks to report how the job search and networking is going, and to get tips/feedback. It seems like the program genuinely cares about us even post-certification, rather than just sending us off in the discouraging-at-times job search. I haven’t experienced the job guarantee “rules” yet, but there are a few parameters (which seem reasonable to me) to follow in order for the job guarantee to apply. I also really benefitted from the mock interviews. I feel I got a good general idea of what to expect. They were realistic and I genuinely can’t imagine finishing a UX bootcamp without knowing how the interviews run (including whiteboard challenges). 

Finding a program that was self-paced was important to me for two reasons: the first being that I was in a different timezone, so online live classes to attend was not realistic for me. Second, I found other bootcamps that were just 4 months. While that may be advantageous for those who are rushing to get a job, I didn’t want to rush my projects and portfolio creation. Since this was my first time learning about UX, I wanted to soak all the learning in without rushing too much. And I’m so glad I did. It’s a lot harder than people think to discipline yourself to complete the course with a goal in mind (eg: I wanted to finish in 6 months, as I didn’t have a full-time job and could devote all my time to the course, but instead it took +/- 12 months!) 

Another plus was that articles we had to read were mostly written by professionals in the field AND written with personality, vs a textbook reading. It made learning much more enjoyable and kept us in the current trends of design. Again, I can’t speak on how my post-completion experience as I’m just beginning, but I can’t imagine it being really negative thanks to Springboard’s support.