Zachary Sims, CEO of Codecademy, explains how the platform teaches practical programming languages like Python and JavaScript through hands-on practice, not lectures. He predicts formal degrees will lose relevance as online education grows, replaced by demonstrable skills that employers can actually see.
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My name is Zach, uh, and I'm the co-founder of a company called Codecademy. We teach people skills they need in order to find jobs in the 21st century online. So we teach people programming, so things like Ruby and Python and JavaScript and HTML, uh, that let them make websites and applications and games and things. So we think everyone should have a functional understanding of what programming is to better understand the world around them. As increasingly every field becomes more and more affected by computers and programming, it's important to understand the foundations of that. So we like to teach people things that help them find jobs, uh, and to do so, it means more than just programming. So anything you can learn, uh, to help you find a job, we wanna teach. So we're an open platform, so anyone can create content on Codecademy. We have universities that are doing it, we have corporations that are doing it, uh, and individuals all over the world that are doing it. And that content then is being consumed both by same groups of people, so universities, companies, individuals all over the world. So that's sort of a marketplace for people to learn skills that matter. So we think Codecademy is different different from everyone else because it's focused on learning by doing, on being interactive, uh, and it's a global community. It's a platform that anyone can create courses on, uh, which leads to a lot of great content, uh, that's available to anyone in a way that's fun to learn, uh, and easy. So traditional education focuses on teaching broad-based ideas to give you a degree, uh, and teaches in a way that's not necessarily right for everyone with lectures and tests and quizzes. We wanna build an educational experience that's accessible to everyone wherever they are and teaches them things that are relevant, uh, as opposed to things that you need just to get a piece of paper. We think with Codecademy alone, we want to teach people, give them an easy way to create things and to find jobs, and to do so online. I think you're going to see a lot of existing educational institutions sort of start to fall apart in the face of companies like us and Udacity and Coursera that are really bringing education online for more and more people who will realize they don't need a formal degree. We think what will matter in the future is the skills and not necessarily the reputation that you have. So giving people those skills and then doing so in a way that lets them be easily discovered by everyone else. I think is what will matter in the future.
