Codecademy CEO Zach Sims discusses how technology creates and displaces jobs, and how his platform teaches coding through short, interactive lessons. He shares the story of a single mother who used Codecademy to find work after a layoff, and describes partnerships with governments worldwide to expand access to coding education.
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I'm Edie Lush, and I'm here in the Hub Culture Pavilion in Davos, really pleased to be joined by Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of Codecademy.
Thank you for having me.
So tell me, technology destroying more jobs than it creates, that's what I've been hearing. What are your thoughts on that?
I think it goes both ways. I think we're seeing an era of technologies being created that will actually also create more jobs for people or enable them to have different types of jobs. So we're seeing kind of fractional work, people participating in the shareable economy that makes more opportunity available to more people.
What does Codecademy do? You've got all kinds of case studies on your website, which I love. Tell me about somebody who's lost their job in their 50s. What has it done for them?
So it helps them kind of find purpose and find a new job. Got an email the other day from a single mother who had just gotten divorced and laid off from her job and decided she wanted to learn something new. Went on Codecademy, spent about 3 months, and sent an email saying she found new purpose and new direction and ended up with a new job as well. So really life-changing stuff for people at any, any stage of their career.
So tell me how it works. I go on Codecademy and then what happens?
And then you start coding immediately. So we, we do it in the browser, so it's interactive. It's a lot of fun. It's not videos. It's not boring.
Mm-hmm. You can also do it on your phone.
And walk step-by-step through things that are pretty much guaranteed to help you find a job with the skills you're learning.
How long is a lesson?
Uh, it can take as little as 5 minutes to get started, and you can spend as much time as a couple of months learning different segments of things. But everything is project-based, so you can make a website, make an app or something like that.
So you're in developed countries. Are you also in developing countries?
We're in every country. I guess the question is just whether or not we are in the language of that country. We work with a lot of governments. So the government of Buenos Aires, for instance, work with them, government of the UK, lots of partners in France and Brazil and elsewhere. So working really on bringing this opportunity to everyone in the world.
So I'm interested, I was speaking to the Minister of Information and Communications for Colombia. He was saying actually he's managed to raise people out of the poverty line purely— one of the reasons is purely by making mobile phone technology, mobile phones and the internet available across the country. Is that your—
Absolutely. I think raising access is the first step to giving people the opportunity to use educational resources like Codecademy. So we try to work with institutions also that are kind of enfranchising more people with access.
What worries you?
What worries me? I think a lot, you know, but, but where we are right now is we're in a space that has so much growth where so many people are looking to find new jobs and there's kind of frictional unemployment that I think there's big opportunity for people to try to solve the skills gap. So I guess the worry is that the skills gap gets bigger and that all of us are not able to do enough to prevent that from happening.
Zach, thank you so much for stopping by the Hub Culture Pavilion here in Davos, and I'm Edie Lush.
