News from Codecademy (Zachary Sims, Co-Founder and CEO) | DLD14

So I'm going to talk to you all today about new education for the new skills that we need for jobs in the 21st century. So first, my name is Zach, and this isn't working. Not working. Ah, there we go. All right. Cool. So my name is Zach. I started this company, Codecademy, around 2 years ago. And when we originally started Codecademy, We started small. So we started with the aspiration to be the easiest way for anyone to learn computer programming online, with the belief and understanding that in the 21st century, as more and more jobs become digital, understanding the basics of programming and being code literate would be more important than almost any other skill in the 21st century. But over the past 2 years, as we've been building Codecademy, what we've realized is that programming is just one of many skills that people need to learn for jobs in the 21st century, and that as every job becomes more and more digital, the skills we need to learn are more digital as well. So I wanted to start talking about some of the broader societal trends that led us to start Codecademy and to try to solve the problem that we're solving today. So when you look across the Eurozone and the US, look at countries like Spain that have 25% unemployment rate across the entire population,— and a problem that's even worse amongst people my age, under the age of 24. In Spain alone, with 56% of people under the age of 24 unemployed. Now, what most people are asking is, "Where are the jobs in this economy?" We have so many young people who are graduating from educational institutions, who may have skills, but who can't find a job. The answer is that the jobs are there, but the skills are not there. Now, 40% of employers in the Eurozone say that they can't find employees with the skills that they need. So we have two different problems here. We have lots of youth and large segments of the population that are unemployed, and lots of companies that can't find people with the right skills they need to fill those jobs. Now, this isn't just a pressing problem for the people that are unemployed, but one-third of those employers say that the lack of skills is slowing business down, slowing growth down across the entire EU and across the rest of the world. So it's pretty clear that teaching people more skills will lead to filling those jobs. The problem is, the educational system we're using now is one that's built for old problems and one that doesn't know how to solve this skills gap. So what most people are asking is, "Is college the answer to this problem?" In the US, most of the time we think it is. President Obama and the First Lady launched a new college readiness program in the US, trying to get more and more students to graduate from 4-year higher education institutions, thinking that simply by raising that number, we'd get more people ready for jobs in the 21st century. But the problem is, these are new problems we're facing, and we're trying to jam more people through old solutions that aren't giving them the education or the skills they need to succeed. In the US, among those people that do go to college, 50% of them, a year after they graduate, find that they're unemployed or underemployed, meaning they didn't need the 4-year education that they went to college for. And in the US, that 4-year education often comes with a price tag of more than $200,000 and years of crippling debt. In the EU, the problem is almost the same, with more than one-third of college graduates taking so-called interim jobs that they didn't need a 4-year college education for. So it's also pretty clear that college isn't the answer to providing more jobs for these people, and that the same educational institutions we've been using aren't the right ones for the future. But it seems that everyone knows about this problem except for the education providers themselves that we're relying on to solve it. 74% of these educational institutions say that they're adequately preparing students for jobs, which, As we've seen with the previous statistics, it's definitely not true, and employers agree, with only 35% of them saying that formal education prepares people for jobs. So you have this massive gap in understanding between the companies and the educational institutions in what it means to be relevant for the 21st century economy. Now, I saw this when I was a student at Columbia, and I dropped out of college, and I started a company with my co-founder Ryan called Codecademy, And what we do with Codecademy is we teach people practical, hands-on skills with the help of people all over the world who can create lessons on Codecademy and share them with anyone they want, whenever they want, on multiple platforms. We focus on learning by doing, letting people take small exercises on their phones, on the web, that they can take while walking down the street, while sitting at a computer, or even while in a classroom. And we do this online and with in-person support in more than 350 cities across the world. So when we started Codecademy, we realized that higher education isn't the only education. And the, the general concept that we use to think about education today is one that sees most people in classrooms. But what we need is learning everywhere and learning that persists beyond the 4-year experience we're used to. So we need to build new education in order to solve a new problem. That's what we're trying to do with Codecademy. So several key learnings we've had over the 2.5 years that we've been building Codecademy. First, that learning doesn't just happen at an educational institution. So as I mentioned, sending more people to college is more people that are spending lots of money and leaving without the requisite skills. Seeing more and more people who need training on the job and aren't getting that education from their employers and can't find a formal educational institution that gives them the skills they need to stay relevant over the course of their career. At the same time, we're seeing almost every other industry become consumerized, where the process of hailing a taxi became as simple as clicking a button on your phone, the process of shopping online came to you in 2 days with Amazon Prime. But the same thing hasn't happened to education. Instead, what we've done is taken videos of education in a classroom and brought them online and said that millions of people across the world can now watch a Harvard lecture the same way they did 50 years ago. So, we think we need to open education the way we want to learn it, and build native education for new platforms with new ways of learning. So that means bite-sized learning that's interactive and actually engaging, and stays with people as they're learning, and customizes their outcomes based on what they want to achieve. We think that it's key to build the workers of the future by partnering with the employers of the future. So this means figuring out which skills are in demand with employers, having them help to create content, and then teaching people the skills they need that are immediately relevant to finding a job, as opposed to now where universities create content and curriculum on their own that's often way divorced from what people need in order to succeed in a modern economy. We also think that anyone has knowledge to share with the world, and so an open platform like Codecademy, where educational institutions can create content, companies can create content, and any individual around the world can create content. It's a way for us to help spread knowledge from unexpected places to new people all across the world. So in 2.5 years, we've been working based on these principles. We've wondered whether what we're doing is working, and we think we're seeing the beginnings of a societal shift in education. With, on Codecademy alone, more than 24 million people having taken simple lessons that start teaching them the skills they need for the 21st century. And we hope that this is only the start, with millions more who will learn the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century. Thank you.

I am from an educational institution, and I fully agree with you.

Thank you.

My name is Isabelle.

I'm from the—

my name is Isabelle. I'm from the Munich University of Technology, and I'm a professor there, and I fully agree with what you said, and I do think it is the biggest transformation ahead of universities since they were founded due to digitalization. What— can you say a few words on what does this actually mean for the established university model? Where are maybe some opportunities for universities to partner, and where do you see the biggest threats, and what would it mean? How would universities be affected and need to transform?

So I think primarily the issue with universities is that there's very little incentive for them to change, right? You deal with institutions, in the US in particular, that have large endowments, and oftentimes are disconnected from the labor force. An institution like Columbia, where I went, isn't necessarily threatened by fewer people applying or fewer people becoming interested in these jobs. I think the biggest thing that colleges can do is actually take risks. And kind of be on the offensive against something like this. If you look at a university like NYU that started building global campuses, a lot of other universities that are approaching the challenge of online education, I think the biggest problem for most universities is doing nothing. So thinking big about using the assets that they have, whether that's a brand name or professors or content, and thinking about ways that that applies in a world where skills are more relevant than a degree. Anyone else have questions?

How do you plan to incentivize the youth into, I mean, engaging with this stuff and learning it? I mean, do you expect the free market to do it, or do you expect governments or, I mean, the companies to do it?

So it's, it's a mix of both. So we work with a lot of governments. So we've worked with governments in the UK, Malaysia, Colombia, a bunch of countries across the world. Uh, and that oftentimes helps by putting Codecademy in schools. We also tried to build a product that, as you mentioned, that is good enough on its own for people to find it, discover it, and use it. I think when we first built the product, we really had a feeling we were onto something. We got an email from parents, uh, that told us that their students weren't playing Xbox and were instead playing on Codecademy. I think if you create an experience that's engaging enough, for someone to use, that they'll find it, and it won't necessarily be thought of as just learning skills, but instead something they can do that's fun, you know, with that 10 minutes in the subway, instead of playing Candy Crush, you know, learning something fun and interesting that can help you succeed. We have one back there.

Sorry, I don't know if you can hear me. Yeah, Felix. I work at Twitter. But my question is, listening to you, I was kind of wondering whether that is what education is about, whether education is all about learning skills to be successful in the workforce, or whether education is more about learning stuff about yourself and about the world, and where the discovery element comes in. Because listening to you, it all seems very streamlined. I learn to work and then I work better. And, but where's the individual? I mean, you know, I might be very romantic when it comes to that, but I believe that even the bachelor system we have, we study 3 years, which is new in Germany. Before, I mean, friends of mine, they studied for 10 years. Not saying they probably got better at their job, but for me, they had millions of ideas they could play with. There was breaks they could take, especially in the arts. And Where does that come into the Codecademy kind of theory or practice?

So I agree with you. I went to a liberal arts institution before dropping out, right? And I think that was of tremendous value. I think the issue in the US is that the cost structure isn't necessarily, doesn't allow for you to go and spend 4 years and leave and use those ideas and change the way you've thought without being burdened by debt, right? In the US alone, you've paid $200,000 for a 4-year college education. And the job you get is basically, you know, you need to do whatever you can to pay the bills and pay student debt off for the next 10 years. So I think the question is, people kind of have to make that decision over whether the trade-off of those 4 years and that experience is worth sort of the next 10 that they're going to be paying debt off for. I think if we had the opportunity to send everyone to a school, liberal arts education, that opened their minds, and it was inexpensive, and sort of available without other cost, then that would be wonderful. Just think, providing people with alternatives. Is important. Cool. Great. Thank you.