General Assembly UX Bootcamp Review (My Thoughts, Pros v. Cons)

hey guys welcome back to my channel today as promised i'm going to be talking about my experience at general assembly's ux design bootcamp now in this video i'm going to be talking about my experience and then the pros and the cons and then whether or not i think it's worth it let's take a look at the website and it looks like everything is still relatively the same the only difference now is everything is remote so it may not be as immersive as you know as stated when you first go into it the first week you know you're basically just learning the basics and you're starting with a small project the the project itself is basically working with another person you know creating like an app that helps them and kind of helps their needs whatever it may be super short project and essentially just to apply the basics to uh you know what you learned to that first project week two you're already diving into the second project the second project is essentially designing an e-commerce website that e-commerce website is going to be very very um bare bones it's going to be low fidelity so a lot of grayscale applying what you've learned in those two weeks or surrounding ux design to that project and i believe it's week three that you dive right into you know an actual group project the group project itself is going to be redesigning a website and this is going to be enough for you to really apply the full ux um process to it and that's going to be you know doing research conducting user interviews it's like user testing to see you know where you can improve on on the um on the app and then it's a two-week project where you work with your team redesign it this is going to be a portfolio piece so you definitely want to make sure that you know you really pay attention to detail make it look as best as it can that way you know when you're when you're finished with the course you won't have to go back and kind of make those little adjustments so do your best to make sure that that third project is going to be up to par and then project five is going to be working with a real client general assembly will reach out to different companies and clients and help find you a company that you can work with to help address you know their potential needs at that point so it could be you know designing a new tool it could be redesigning a website or you know designing a new tool that they can hopefully apply in the future and that'll be nice because that'll give you opportunity to work with hopefully a design team and a product team and you'll kind of see the ins and outs of what it looks like to be a ux designer so that's essentially it it's a 10-week program you're basically working with projects every week and you know at the end and once you wrap up everything there's a career fair with where general assembly you know uh invites different companies or represents representatives from different companies to come in and you can showcase your work and then you know hopefully if they like your work you have a potential to you know get like hired or you know get an interview so that pretty much wraps up what your experience will look like going through the boot camp so now let's talk about the pros and the cons and i'll start with the pros so i like that it's very structured it's set up like a college classroom when you walk in there's an instructor and you're going to be learning through slides and then there's many assignments along the way they start with the basics and each week or each day you kind of learn new topics and then dive a little bit deeper into ux another pro is they had what's called lunch and learns so the instructor will reach out to industry professionals and they'll have them come in for an hour like every week or every other week to kind of talk to you about their day-to-day experience working in their positions as ux designers and it's really nice because ux design is such a broad field and there's so many different like specialties or roles that you can kind of fill in a position so we had an opportunity to talk to a ux manager from amazon we had two ux designers come in from i think it was aetna and then we had designers come in from a digital design agency and so it's really nice because each person kind of had such different such different responsibilities and it was really cool to kind of see what you may eventually be doing and actually some of them uh were former aga graduates so that was really nice because that kind of gave us confidence in seeing that you know there were boot camp graduates that ended up landing full time positions and when you're kind of committing that much money to like a boot camp you're really hoping that this can actually allow you to make that career transition and land a full-time position another pro is you get the ability to work in a team environment so in project three and project five you're working with three or four people to you know build up to one redesign the app and then to working with a real client so it really allows you to kind of collaborate and it's and see that when you're designing there's going to be conflicting ideas and opinions and visions of you know what the perfect product is going to look like and then also different methodologies that people want to use so you kind of have the opportunity to be in a position where you're going to have potential idea conflicts and then you're also going to have the ability to see your ideas grow from just opinions or ideas of other people and if you've never worked in like a collaborative environment for something this is going to be your great opportunity to to do that and see what that may look like for you so another pro is you had the opportunity to work with a career coach so i don't know if it was every week or every other week but we had like an hour or two where a career coach would come in and we were different we work on different topics as it pertains to you know the job search after we talked about personal branding we talked about resumes cover letters how interview process typically goes and it's nice to have you know the ux design learning and then the dedicated in a job searching section within the boot camp so i thought that that was helpful now moving on to the cons so each class was taught by an instructor who has industry experience and then two assistant instructors the assistant instructors were previous boot camp graduates so they weren't designers that had industry experience in the fields and i found this to be challenging because sometimes when you were asking questions they may not be able to answer those questions in like an in-depth or you know just from a personal experience type thing it was very speculative so i didn't have confidence in all the answers that they were giving and the assistant instructors were giving about half of the lessons and so you know on the on certain topics where you there may be a need for you know an answer from somebody that has experience in that the the instructor wasn't available at the time so i thought that was an opportunity so another con surrounds how the day is structured about three to four hours a day we would be spending on classroom learning materials and then the rest of the day would be spent on just project time and this is useful for the days where you needed to be working with your team but i found that you know outside of that there was a lot of times i thought was that was being wasted you know that i was paying money to to be here and you know i wasn't kind of getting the most out of it and that's how i felt because there were many topics where i felt like we could have dove deeper on and this kind of ties into that next con is just the depth of some of the topics so for instance like accessibility and data visualization uh material and uh higg you know design systems and kind of learning a little bit more versus just like the general like oh design systems or things like that i wanted more practice or more challenges or like you know in classroom like homework or whatever i felt like we could have used a lot of that project time on learning those topics a little bit deeper because you know after the boot camp when i was actually interviewing some of these topics actually came up and i wish that i had more in-depth knowledge from it and i felt like yeah i could have learned that outside or went deeper into it outside the class but you know if you're having three hours available to you you know why are we not learning that in the actual class so that's another thing and finally i felt like there was an opportunity for the instructors to really give more design critique surrounding the visual aesthetics of everybody's designs i felt like in the class through the course of the 10 weeks there was a lot of people who did get better in their visual designs however you know when you compared to you know what's out there right now you know just existing designs there was an opportunity for much more design critique to make sure that those elements you know the visual elements were up to par especially when it comes to you know putting those onto your portfolio you want to make sure that your portfolio is going to be captivating for employers when they go on your portfolio and it's not visually appealing or it doesn't capture their attention they're just going to move on to the next person i felt like you know some of the classmates got screwed on that and i didn't want to be the one that's you know goes out and kind of critiques their design especially during that time because i was like i'm still you know learning and i'm still trying to get better i don't want to be you know here i'm not it wasn't my position or in my place really to kind of give that kind of like potentially harsh critique i guess overall i felt like we could have spent a lot more time on design topics such as design systems accessibility data visualization you know interviews and you know design challenges things like that that will really bring value during the job search so to wrap it all up know what i know now i don't think that fifteen thousand dollars is worth it for what you get i think the biggest value comes in that last client project where you have the opportunity to maybe get hired so to wrap it all up know what i know now i don't think that fifteen thousand dollars is worth it for what you get the biggest value comes in that last client project where if you get matched up with a good client with a good project you may have the opportunity to get hired on after other than that a lot of these topics you can learn yourself especially now knowing the actual breadth of how deep you actually go into it i think you can do a lot of that self-learning now of course before this you kind of don't know what you need to know without going into it i guess so my advice to you guys is look for a boot camp that guarantees you a job meaning that you don't have to pay until you land a full-time position and i think that there are some bootcamps that are out there that offer that and i think that's a great opportunity because it's very competitive guys in my experience only four people myself included landed full-time jobs after the boot camp and it happened 10 months after and so right now the field is very competitive so try to do as much research as you can and if you do pursue this especially with general assembly i wish you guys the best of luck if you have any additional questions please leave them in the comment section i would be happy to answer them and thanks for watching guys and if you found this video helpful please leave a like down below and consider subscribing i will be putting out more videos on different topics and i think they'll be interesting and so yeah thanks for watching guys and hope you guys have a great day and wish you guys the best of luck

Channel: Tony G

Views: 6,935

Rating: 4.9591837 out of 5

Keywords: general assembly, ux design, user experience design, product design, ux bootcamp, reviews

Id: 0NGB5yeTj0Q

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020