Category Archives: Career Development

5 Things Great Product Managers Do Every Day

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Assessing-You-Products-Market-ViabilityMy favorite product managers are quietly powerful. Every day they take small steps that move their teams and business forward in a meaningful way. But they do it without a lot of hoopla, taking a confident yet unassuming approach.

After all, product managers have a lot on their plate every day. They are responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for their product. It is a big responsibility that requires facilitating and collaborating with many different teams — both internal and external — without the formal authority to manage those teams. It requires a unique mix of humility and strength.

However, that quiet power does not mean leading product is easy. I realized early on that the daily life of a product manager is unpredictable, hectic, and sometimes very tough.

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Our Network Just Got A Lot Bigger

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Teaching and learning at General Assembly

Today, General Assembly is making a couple of big announcements.

First, we have closed on our company’s first acquisition — Canadian tech and design career accelerator, Bitmaker. We’ve known the folks at Bitmaker for a long time and I’ve been incredibly impressed with the way their CEO, Andrew Mawer, has built his Toronto-based organization. I’ve watched him lead his team and grow their community to become Canada’s largest career accelerator, and I’m so excited to have them be part of GA as we continue to pursue our long-term vision around education-to-employment.

Second, we are announcing the largest expansion of our campus footprint in GA’s history — we are increasing our number of campuses by over 60%. Our ongoing mission is to impact people’s careers and more broadly solve the talent needs of employers everywhere. We see big opportunities to leverage our burgeoning online communities and audiences with new campuses that are closer to the biggest pockets of potential students, just outside of traditional urban hotspots more commonly associated with the tech sector.

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Pursuing A Career Change: How To Find The Best Version Of You

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Career change image

Embracing your professional development or pursuing a career change can seem daunting, tedious and, at times, impossible. We often measure success by comparing ourselves to those around us, instead of focusing on our own qualities.

The reality is that there are many paths forward, and each person has a unique approach to finding theirs. Your success is the byproduct of a process of trial and error, your own experiments, and the practice of learning along the way.

Jen Glantz and Francesco Marconi’s paths have been anything but similar. While both live in New York City, one is an entrepreneur and the other works at The Associated Press. They, along with many others, started pursuing a career change while feeling lost. They asked themselves, “What should I do with my life? Why am I working here? Am I in the right place?”

As they found their answers, they came to share the belief that true fulfillment comes when you start focusing on building the “best version of yourself.”

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This Sydney UX Designer’s Advice Will Inspire You to Change Careers

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General Assembly Classroom StudentsAs the tech sector continues to top employment charts with the highest number of job openings, you may be wondering how you can land one for yourself. Many people leverage web development and data science skills to transition into a tech career. But in this high-demand, highly competitive field, user experience (UX) design know-how can be a powerful asset, too. In the past five years alone, jobs requiring UX skills increased by 15% with an average advertised salary of $99,177, according to a report by GA and Burning Glass Technologies. The UX industry is exploding.

Wondering how top pros enter the field and navigate the UX universe? Here’s what Damian Norton, a Sydney-based UX/UI designer at Qantas, had to say:

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Inside The Mind Of The Designer

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UX Design Career Change

How do user experience (UX) designers think? What does the thought process look like from initial challenge to user-friendly solution? What if you could just peek inside the brain of a UX designer and watch the gears turn?

Join us for a Design In Motion panel event happening at your local General Assembly campus. Until the end of June, we’ll gather the leading minds of UX and product design to discuss design strategy. You’ll be able to see the design thinking process in action as industry experts walk through the design challenge they’ve been tasked with—whether it’s revamping a flight search app or thinking up a genius digital experience for the Rio Olympics.

We asked some our guests from a wide range of backgrounds about their unique paths to building memorable experiences, where they find design inspiration, and what advice they’d offer to aspiring designers.

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An Agency Perspective on Hiring at General Assembly

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Hiring at General Assembly

Keval Baxi is the CEO and Chairman of Codal, a UX Design, Web & Mobile application development agency based in Chicago. Below, he shares his thoughts on hiring at General Assembly, why he uses General Assembly as a talent pipeline for his company, and tips for graduates on how to stand out to recruiters and hiring managers.

You can almost always find someone from my company, Codal, attending one of the “Meet & Hire” events at General Assembly’s Chicago campus. As an agency that has grown at a consistently high pace over the last few years, we are always looking out for additional talent to join our team. It can often be very challenging to find quality candidates for interviews, but we’ve had a lot of success with hiring at General Assembly — especially at Meet & Hire events. We’ve put together several aspects of GA that have brought our company value and advice for new grads about getting hired.

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How Learning to Code Helped Me Grow as a Recruiter

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Learning to code

One of the best perks of working at General Assembly is that employees can take any part-time class or workshop for free. Last year, I took General Assembly’s Backend Web Development Course (BEWD) to learn how to code. As someone who works in Talent Acquisition at General Assembly, I thought this would be valuable so I could better understand our product offering. I also figured it would be easier to interview technical candidates if I understood the lingo.

Next week, I’m attending the Greenhouse Open, a three-day gathering of talent acquisition and HR professionals in San Francisco from May 25-27.  I am really looking forward to the “Programming for Recruiters” workshop with Michael Bouffard, VP of Engineering at Greenhouse, on Friday, May 27. I think every recruiter, especially one who speaks with engineers on a regular basis, should understand programming basics. As I prepare to attend Greenhouse Open next week, I’m reflecting on my experience taking BEWD and how it’s been helpful in my day to day role recruiting talent, as well as managing our systems and tools.

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Swipe Right for a New Job: How Career Networking Just Got A Lot Like Dating

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New job app from Earnest

Technology has changed the game for job hunters. It has eliminated the need for newspaper classifieds, paper resumes, envelopes, and stamps. Today, you can fire off dozens of resumes in just one sitting.

While it’s easier than ever to feel like you’re actively applying, resumes too often end up in an abyss. As it turns out, the old-fashioned (and time-consuming) way of job searching — networking with other people — is still the most useful way to land a great gig. There’s just one problem for modern job seekers: making contact isn’t easy if you’re siloed in your office for eight to ten hours a day.

Entrepreneur Brian Ma set out to solve precisely this dilemma — using an app, of course. Enter Weave.

“The least effective way [to get a job] is to submit a resume, and the most effective is to meet someone,” he says.

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L’Oréal Pioneers General Assembly’s Newest Assessment Based Training Model

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Assessments at General Assembly

The shift to data-driven marketing is changing the way we all do business. It is a powerful tool that enables us to cultivate more meaningful relationships with our customers – all of whom expect more value, more services, more engagement, and more conversations with all of our beauty brands. This is what makes our 7,000-person worldwide marketing team so invaluable to L’Oréal’s success.

We’ve always invested in the growth and development of our employees, and last year committed to building an online learning platform for our digital marketers through a customized education program with General Assembly. By arming our marketers with the most innovative tools and trainings, we are simultaneously upskilling our talent while transforming the company’s digital capabilities.

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General Assembly is Best for NYC

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General Assembly is Best for NYC

Earlier this spring, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) launched the Best for NYC campaign, “designed to inspire and equip New York City businesses to measure and improve practices that help create well-paying jobs and improve the quality of life in all five boroughs, while also strengthening their bottom-line.”  

Earlier this week, General Assembly was recognized as “Best for NYC” along with businesses from multiple sectors across the five boroughs. We scored in the top 10 in the Community category for metrics including “charitable giving, diversity and inclusion, worker ownership, and social impact through products and services.”

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