In 2021, 69% of U.S. executives say they prefer job candidates with data skills.* Spend 20 minutes with expert GA instructor Danny Malter and emerge with a better understanding of:
When you’re ready to go further, explore our upcoming Data Analytics course to cement your foundation in Excel, SQL, and data visualization with Tableau.
Each year, the United States honors Latinx Heritage Month to celebrate the histories, cultures, and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors originated from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. But like the dynamic community this heritage month honors, it moved forward.
Founded in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week, this event eventually evolved into Hispanic Heritage Month and then — more recently — Latinx Heritage Month. Latinx is a newer term that has gained popularity among scholars, activists, and millennials. The intent behind this movement is to create a more inclusive space for gender non-conforming individuals.
While Latinx aims to provide a space for everyone, it’s important to know that one term cannot possibly encompass all the diverse communities, nations, and identities this event recognizes. Listening is always the best way to start a brave conversation — just because someone is from a Latin country, it doesn’t necessarily mean they identify as Latino, Latina, or even Latinx.
It comes as no surprise to us that Latinx people make up the fastest growing demographic of entrepreneurs in the United States. While only 6.2% of all Americans run a business, Latinx founders accounted for 15% of American entrepreneurs in 2019. The same year, Latinx businesses in the U.S. created 3 million jobs and generated nearly $500 billion in sales for the economy.
While Latinx people continue to excel, they have so much more to offer our community:
Our work is cut out for us. While Latinx people have made an unparalleled impact in our country’s economy and technology, there’s still room to move forward. Our job as educators is to bring these discrepancies to light so that we can foster real, measurable — and overdue — change.
But one thing is for certain: Progression never goes backward.
At General Assembly we are listening and evolving to become more inclusive of other cultures, languages, and communities.
Our team in Europe is running the first ever bootcamp cohort in Spanish. We’ve partnered with the Adecco Foundation to grant scholarships to 26 Spaniards with disabilities to help guide their careers toward technology with our Software Engineering Immersive.
Additionally, we’ve teamed up with Techqueria, the largest community of Latinx in tech, to support their Latinx Heritage Month Summit and create initiatives that build on our commitment to making GA a more inclusive place for our Latinx students.
The future of tech looks bright, mi gente. ¡Dale!
Check out our upcoming Latinx-themed events to stay engaged and learn even more:
Diversity & Inclusion in Tech | Wednesday, Sept. 23
Latinx Leaders in Tech | Friday, Sept. 25
Latinx Recruiters AMA | Wednesday, Oct. 7
Turning Failure Into Fuego | Thursday, Oct. 8
Designing With Inclusion in Mind | Thursday Oct. 8
Costa a Costa: Tijuana + San Diego + Miami | Thursday, Oct. 8
Your Right to Vote | Friday, Oct. 9
How They Got There: Latinx Leaders in Tech and Business | Wednesday, Oct. 14
We believe every student should be able to invest in new tech skills — without worrying about obstructive costs and financial challenges. From zero-interest loans to deferred payments and scholarships, you’ve got options to help you afford learning at GA — no matter your financial situation.
Our friends at Climb have created a quiz to help you discover your best solution:
Every graduate of our User Experience Design Immersive career accelerator gets the opportunity to work with a real-world client that’s looking to solve a particular consumer problem. The experience gives students a chance to apply the UX design process to real life, as well as invaluable insights and impactful results that they can use to stand out in their job searches.
Here are a few of our instructors’ favorites.
The client: City + County of San Francisco
The challenge: San Francisco’s Community Ambassadors are the bridge between city individuals and city services. In addition to the great things that they do for the city and its people, they have to log every single thing they do. The city teamed up with UXDI students to enhance the Ambassadors’ day-to-day mobile experience and improve data collection.
The client: Pandia Health, a startup that provides a convenient, affordable way to get birth control.
The challenge: The client came to GA students with three areas to work on: a new homepage, a design for a forum-like question and answer page, and their onboarding process, which includes an online form for prescriptions.
The client: Posture Wings is a startup athletic bra manufacturer producing patented garments that are bio-mechanically engineered to reverse poor posture.
The challenge: When Posture Wings’s flagship product sold out, they worked with UXDI students to quickly set up an e-commerce site that would support a second production run.
The client: nēdl, an app that lets radio listeners search live broadcasts as easily as they search the internet — by keywords.
The challenge: Nadav Markel, a UXDI graduate in Los Angeles, worked to help nēdl grow its user base, as it was missing out on a large segment of the radio listening market: car drivers. He also set out to help make nēdl more safe to use while driving.
Even before the twists and turns caused by COVID-19, digital transformation was top-of-mind for today’s business leaders. Companies everywhere are reimagining their workforces and doubling down on digital capabilities and systems with an accelerated timeline.
But success isn’t guaranteed.
In fact, 75% of digital transformations fail to generate returns that exceed the original investment1. Why? Because companies often fall into the trap of focusing on systems rather than people. Leading companies recognize that, in order for their digital transformations to work, employees need the structure, mindset, skills, and vocabulary to support and drive new strategies — from senior leadership to those on the front lines.
Through collaborations with global organizations like L’Oréal, Booz Allen Hamilton, Guardian, and many more, we have identified our top six people-first strategies for driving success in digital transformation. We first published this list in 2018 and have refreshed them to meet this moment. Despite rapid market evolution, they still ring true.
Given the far-reaching implications of a successful digital transformation — especially in 2020 — it’s critical to have full leadership support and encouragement from the top. To translate theory into action:
Agility is key to success when undertaking digital transformations. Gone are the days of three-to-five-year strategy cycles and two-to-three-year product and marketing innovation plans. Today’s technologies and consumer needs change faster than historical business roadmaps can deliver.
Winners in this environment learn to adapt and adjust, finding digital equivalents to the traditional processes that guided business thinking and development in the past. This is as much a mindset shift as it is a physical shift in work, as — at least for the short-term — face-to-face consumer interactions have been largely replaced by virtual consumer encounters.
Take Procter & Gamble, which recognized this need and established P&G Ventures to create new, innovative direct-to-consumer brands. “The disruption of DTC was biting on our heels. How consumers are discovering new brands is different than how we grew up. [P&G Ventures] gives us a more nimble, agile way to get closer to the consumer,”2 Leigh Radford, the initiative’s vice president and general manager, said. P&G Ventures brought us on to offer capability training in digital marketing disciplines, including Facebook and social media marketing, eCommerce strategy, and marketing analytics. As a result, most of its product design and brand creative is done in-house, and leaders across all levels and functions know how to remain close to the customer.
The consumer and customer must be at the center of any successful digital transformation. This is the only way to stay grounded in the reality of the market and resist the urge to chase every new trend or platform.
First and foremost, it’s essential to understand your consumers — their tastes, habits, ways of communicating, and pathways to purchase. Leading companies implement tools such as journey mapping, personas, and user research to learn about consumer needs. Then, assess the best way to organize and address your findings through different departments such as product development, marketing, and sales.
Finally, allow for new injections of people, ideas, and technology within your organization to incorporate new abilities, approaches, and ideas. We’ll explore this further in Strategy 6.
Digital transformations often fail to take HR into account, particularly when it comes to managing employee performance against executing on these goals. This is often a severe blocker to real change — if people’s personal goals, compensation, and motivators aren’t aligned with the organization’s, there’s unlikely to be much positive impact.
Update performance management tools to reflect the business metrics and desired behaviors that matter to individual roles, and track the metrics that employee efforts can directly impact. We recommend using “micro-metrics” such as:
You can further support employees by describing key behaviors and competencies that will help them achieve success.
We believe strongly in “data-driven people strategy.” In practice, this means that hiring, development, and team structure are all underpinned by robust assessments, and the resulting data helps to understand and pinpoint each individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
GA assessments are built in partnership with top industry executives on our Standards Boards who help define excellence in their fields. By designing and deploying practical skills assessments, we provide employers with a clear and consistent understanding of their teams’ abilities in key high-demand domains, including marketing, data, and tech.
Collecting this data can shape a variety of goals, including benchmarking existing talent against the industry, evaluating job applicants, designing learning paths for employees, and making decisions about organizational structure.
Given the speed at which change is taking place, our recommendation is simple: Companies need to invest in learning, both at the institutional and individual levels. Leaders not only need to embrace new technologies but also build digital mindsets at all levels of the organization to power new ways of working.
Keep in mind: Talent with in-demand skills is not only scarce and expensive but also difficult to retain, so companies cannot rely on “buying” talent alone3. Prioritizing up- and reskilling is a necessary measure in order to transform teams and organizations for the future. “Building” talent through training programs is often a more efficient route to acquire these skills versus searching for them externally. What’s more, research suggests that education is among the most-valued benefits for modern employees, boosting retention, engagement, and loyalty.
Thomas Malone, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and director of its Center for Collective Intelligence, told Deloitte that: “Many decisions in a company are made by communities — a kind of informal consensus involving community norms. If you want to accomplish almost anything in the world and if you’re realistic about it, you need to be thinking about how to work with [collective community intelligence] to achieve whatever you want.”4
As you build a culture of learning, the foundation of digital transformations, it’s essential that everyone — from the CEO to individual contributors — is involved.
Learn more about how General Assembly can help guide your company’s talent transformation.
1PwC Front-Office Transformation, Walking the Talk: We prioritize people over technology, and you should, too, June 2018
2Forbes, Big Firms Can’t Innovate: How P&G Ventures Is Dispelling The Myth, April 2019
3Josh Bersin, Rethinking the Build vs. Buy Approach To to Talent, October 2019
4Deloitte, Superminds: How humans and machines can work together, January 2019
General Assembly and the Adecco Group are excited to announce a partnership with the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s Athlete Career and Education (ACE) program. We are sponsoring 10 part-time, full scholarships for current and retired Team USA members. Athletes will work with us to choose a part-time course — free of charge — that best meets their career goals, gaining in-demand skills like data analytics, digital marketing, software engineering, and more sustainable career paths.
The ACE program, with the support of donors and organizations like the Adecco Group and DeVry University, serves and empowers active and retired Team USA athletes in their pursuit of personal, educational, and professional success.
As the first students get their feet wet in the first few weeks of classes, we’ll be sharing their athlete-to-student journeys on our pages for inspiration — we are confident you will want to get to know them better!
Alina Urs is a professional athlete and fitness coach currently residing in Los Angeles, California. Originally from Romania, she was on the Romanian national kayak team and won over 70+ national and international medals. She also represented Team USA at world championships and the Pan American Games. She began training clients professionally in Europe and continued training clients when she moved to New York City, where she worked at Equinox for 10 years as both a top-performing coach and fitness manager.
Alina holds a bachelor’s degree in sports/physical education and psychology. She is also a certified health coach and medical exercise specialist with a focus on immune system health.
We are excited to launch The 2030 Movement — a week-long festival of free workshops and panel events focused on coding, data, design, marketing, and career development — in effort to build a better world through tech by 2030.
Whether you’re looking to dive deeper into data, code your way into a new career, or simply make meaningful professional connections, our robust lineup of workshops and panel events offers something for everyone . Discover what’s coming up!
Hear from thought leaders and industry experts about how you can stay in demand in your career — no matter what 2030 throws at you.
As industries begin to lean on technology more and more, learn how you can stay in touch with the personal, human side of business.
What’s good for business can also be good for the planet. Find out how you can make a positive global impact before 2030!
A whole new era of tech is dawning on us. What exactly can we expect industries and businesses to look like in 2030?
We know you’re ready to trailblaze into 2030, but that doesn’t mean you should lose sight of your own well-being. Let’s talk self-care, self-love and self-satisfaction.
Arm yourself with the skills needed and hear from professionals who’ve made the switch to the startup and tech industry.
Be 2030-ready. Join The Movement.
A message from co-founder and CEO Jake Schwartz:
Today marks an important new chapter in the General Assembly story. We’ve had a lot of these big milestones since we started as a team of four almost ten years ago. In that time, we raised five rounds of venture capital, expanded to nearly forty markets in seven countries, launched hundreds of new programs and courses, worked with over 400 companies on large-scale digital transformation initiatives, and were acquired by the largest human capital solutions company in the world.
All of these chapters had a few common threads. Our mission, our vision, our approach to the world — and, me as CEO. So this new chapter is going to be different, which will involve me stepping away from my role as CEO of General Assembly after ten amazing years.
As with any big change, I feel some uncertainty and a level of trepidation (a feeling I know that our students experience every single day as they gain new skills and transform their careers). But I’m also really, really happy, because we’ve found a really dynamic and talented executive to step into the CEO role. Over the past six months, we’ve run a robust and intensive search, with a lot of deliberation and consideration of many talented and qualified candidates.
So: I am excited to announce Lisa Lewin as our new Chief Executive Officer, starting August 17. I have absolute confidence that Lisa is the leader who will ensure that General Assembly reaches its ambitious growth goals, while also contributing to the culture that will ensure its continued success. I am also looking forward to being a part of this process — I’ve told Lisa I’m here for whatever support she wants or needs (while of course not getting in the way.)
At the start of GA, I was just coming out of the painful anxious experience of graduating college into a recession, feeling lost and lonely in the world of work. Being able to translate that experience into an ever expanding pathway for others in the same predicament has been incredibly meaningful to me personally. But to be able to build this among a brilliant cast of thousands — team members, students, alumni, partners, investors — has been the greatest honor of my working life. I cannot think of a better steward for the next phase of this company’s development than Lisa Lewin, and I cannot wait to see what comes next for General Assembly.
To learn more about General Assembly’s new CEO, Lisa Lewin, read our press release here.
What is content marketing? Is it content creation or marketing? Well — it’s both. Content marketing encompasses the creation, editing, and distribution of content to help a specific target customer along in their journey toward a business. It’s marketing that simply looks like content. And that’s why it’s a tactic every marketer must have in their toolkit.
Here’s a quick take from GA instructor Kristy LaPlante, who’s worked with iconic global brands including Disney, Nike, Samsung, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and more.
If you’re curious to keep exploring, discover our popular short-form marketing workshops or dive deeper in our upcoming 1-week or evening Digital Marketing course to cement a versatile foundation in the tools that make powerful marketing campaigns and strategies.
With social media evolving seemingly by the day, it’s a critical part of any marketer’s audience development strategy—from Facebook to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Watch this quick lesson to get a foundation in the essentials from GA instructor Kristy LaPlante:
If you’re curious to keep exploring, discover our popular short-form marketing workshops or dive deeper in our upcoming 1-week or evening Digital Marketing course to cement a versatile foundation in the tools that make powerful marketing campaigns and strategies.