Honest review of Springboard UX UI Bootcamp 2020

hi everyone my name is jacqueline and today i'm going to talk to you about my experience with springboard so um i was where you guys were at about a year ago in 2019 researching different ux ui boot camps and seeing if this was the correct or right career change for me and how that really kind of fit into my life and whether i could take the risk and go into school again you know so i was researching different bootcamps i did springboard in 2019 ended in early 2020 and um yeah and now i'm a full-fledged full-time ux designer i found a job fairly quickly after graduating boot camp so and you know for some reason or for somehow people have been finding me on linkedin and you know i get a couple of questions and people reaching out to me a month um just asking me about my experience and asking me how my experience was in boot camp and why i chose springboard and i'm in by not any means sponsored by them or anyone put me up to this but truly wanted to kind of share my experience and yeah not that i'm anyone particularly important but i do feel that people have really valid questions i would just love to help anyone who's going through the same process as i was so this video will not be about breaking down the springboard curriculum i think you could find a lot of that just researching online but more so of my pros and cons and the experiences that i had with springboard and how that kind of translate to my work now right well i'll give you a little context about springboard um well springboard i was researching different programs about a year ago i was also working full-time i was a fashion designer before i made a career change and so i was working full-time and i wasn't willing to completely quit my job and i had to know whether the boot camps that i'm taking were flexible with my time were they self-paced could they be conducted online um because in terms of feasibility there was just no way that i could have physically attended classes so boot camps like general assembly or the uci um i forgot what their program was called but you say i offered a program those are out of question i could not attend physically so you know flexibility was very important to me as researching these programs or these boot camps that their offerings were very similar across the board which made it very tricky to know which boot camp was right for me and for one a springboard offered one-on-one mentors so that wasn't that i knew was important to me i wanted someone to download to me some real life experience um not only that but um i always tell students when you pick your mentor and they do give you an opportunity to kind of pick or kind of create a preference in terms of what kind of specialization you actually want to go into um to be very specific so i tell students to be very very specific with the type of mentor that they want so for me it was you know my mentor had to be at least a veteran like doing this for 10 years i will not have mentors only been doing this for like three years or two years um not that that those people don't bring any value or valuable knowledge but because there's just quite a difference when you are mentored under someone who's been doing this for 10 years and has had experiencing managing teams and has been experienced you know they just have more experience and you you'll know by talking to them yes the one-on-one mentorship extremely i would say the most valuable um asset a bootcamp can offer you um i mean the lessons are given but a really good mentor could make or break your experience um so make sure that you have good chemistry with your mentor and you feel that they are challenging you as well as encouraging you um and what's great about springboard and i'm sure with other bootcamps is that you have the opportunity to switch mentors if you feel like it's not a good fit on top of that uh just to speak into the type of support that you do have at springboard is once you start beginning your job search process um or thinking about the more career orientated projects they do have career counselors for you and i had an amazing um career counselor as well as a mentor but um he really helped me through a lot of tough times in the job search process so once you're done with the program you transition to the job search process um so your career counselor you should be meeting up quite often and i wanted to meet up with him bi-weekly so he could like check up on me um reassess where i was with certain job opportunities and create like me and him we would create a job strategy and to be honest it was really good having someone to be a sound board because i honestly it's a really tough time you guys know it um and having someone to talk to and and having someone to ground you and say hey you know this is pretty normal like not getting calls right away is pretty normal so i think that was just really awesome so i during that time i was debating between um i believe springboard career foundry and design lab but i think what made me choose springboard at the end was their idp project so as you know um all these bootcamps are have projects that are portfolio oriented right so um all these projects are you know self prompts and prompts that they give you but there's just one project at the end where they actually pair you up with a actual startup company so i think that's goes back to my worry was um when i was getting into this was could this really land me a job how applicable applicable was this um having that real life experience really was cherry on top for me and i was immediately sold when i found that out um because why not you're having this real life experience that you don't necessarily need to apply for convince a company that you're really good at something so you get paired up so how it worked was um you kind of write down your preference um with the industry that you want to get into so for me i wrote down mental health health um and wellness industry um i didn't necessarily get paired up with that type of industry i get i got paired up with ed tech startup company from india um and most of the companies are very very startup you'll find that the companies that they pair you up with are in the very very beginning stages of their companies so they need a lot of help and the other question was did it help you land the job i would say i mean i can't deny that it did um obviously it helped me create a very competitive portfolio um my job search process was about two months before i landed my job yeah my camera stopped so where'd i leave off um yeah so springboard was really good in having keeping that structure um because building portfolio takes a lot of time it takes a lot of motivation so they have that structure for me to really build out a competitive portfolio so that was great um you have to yourself put in a lot of work into networking into being very proactive in your job search in order to get that job i mean you're not going to graduate with this portfolio start sending out job applications and hope that you know you're going to get the job like it took me it took a lot of i mean i i had a really good job strategy to be honest i could get more into that later because i feel like i have so much to share on that and how i was able to land a lot of interviews um but yeah i mean my point is that it takes a lot of effort i i think springboard school in general can only help you so much but um it's in your own hands so the other question i always get is so how does my how does it translate to my job i would say um what you learned in school what you're doing in my job um it's completely different and i don't mean that the knowledge that i gained wasn't able to like transfer over i would say that the the type of work you do is so different you're just in this different environment um well it might be different for me because i work um in with enterprise products and i work as a consulting company um so that's much different from my portfolio which was a lot of consumer products and very like exploratory exploratory and creative um projects so it is much different so i'm just speaking from my experience that it is a lot different um when you're you know getting paid to do this there's a lot more pressure um you're not just executing things based off of your own understanding there's so many um components to it like you are designing for business you're coming into something that is not necessarily new and so you have to adhere to the current structure the current process the current um design system um so it's not as creative but not as exploratory you're solving real problems right um and you don't get to choose and pick what problems you get to solve it it certainly is part of the job but of course know that um when you start working there is so much more to learn and with that said i will jump into the cons i don't think there were much cons but if i were to say that there were cons um here's one so repetitive prompts and in my interviews when i go into interviews i never say i never talk about boot camp i don't say anything about bootcamp it's in my resume but i won't bring it up until somebody does certain people who who who you know still have a stigma around bootcamp my boss certainly didn't um but there's other people hiring managers hiring managers that i have talked to who have a stigma around boot camp so i've noticed when i was looking at other students portfolio that honestly we have to stay in prompts and we have the same outcomes designs and projects so and and i remember someone saying um that they could tell when they see a student's portfolio because it's very cookie-cutter and i think that's what they mean is that they'll see the same projects as they're going through these portfolios so that was something that i wanted to avoid um but in certain cases in springboard it wasn't avoidable the second thing was now that i'm working i kind of in hindsight wish there were certain topics that they went over better um and i feel like that they didn't go into more granularity of as in there are certain topics that they maybe just kind of described in theory described as concept but in fact you kind of need to know a lot more about that to do a good job i don't know if the program has changed so maybe they've done a better job at this but for example the white warning um during my day when they had lessons on whiteboarding you kind of read of like what a whiteboard entails and what is expected but it was like an article or two and i don't know about you but i learn by emulation and i learn by watching people do things so reading how to do whiteboard and whiteboard means um it's it's part of the interview some sometimes it's part of the interview process where they give you a prompt and you're supposed to design out loud on this like white board so um so you know that's our sort of thing is sort of hard to read about but not actually have watched and seen it yourself and that's something you could ask your mentor but to be honest to have like if you youtube i even youtube people going through whiteboard challenges i felt like that was more uh more of a better learning type of source than reading about it so that's one another thing was um to be honest like i do a lot of design creating design systems at my work during time i think springboard i mean of course they went over what design system is and what it entails um and what they have you do with your projects is create a design guide or yeah basically a brand guide which is different than a design system um brand guide i wouldn't say it's it doesn't get granular enough in terms of um the components um it's different states why that's important um i mean to be honest i i can't if i as a designer now receive a design guide with colors and maybe how the button looks like with like one state and the logo that to me kind of tells me nothing and doesn't really help me build application i've learned that more on the job and noticed okay now i'm looking back at my projects yikes like the things that i created was not um i guess not realistic um like i would literally go back and create a better one knowing what i know now so you know there's type of things i felt like okay they could have stayed more in because those are really really important but they kind of just like i said before go things over in concepts so in my head they're like okay i mean i know that means that must be great but no in fact there's a deeper level and deeper understanding that is needed in certain areas i mean i hope that was helpful um i'm sure there's a lot of other questions that i'm skipping over but i mean these were the most common questions i get on linkedin um i would love to another part i would love to talk about is sort of my job search process and my job search strategy um and how i was able to land a job quickly after boot camp so i'll just say that for another time or else this video's gonna be extremely long um or maybe no one watches this and um and it ends here all right so yeah well thank you so much for watching this far if you have any questions leave a comment below um and i'll try to get them asap all right bye guys

Channel: Jacks In UX

Views: 17,140

Rating: 4.9725556 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie

Id: 46MHVVHZkR4

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020