karaboz June 5, 2019 at 12:40

Rating of additional education platforms in IT: according to the results of the My Circle study

We continue to publish the results of our study on education in IT. In the first part, we dealt with education in general: how it affects employment and career, in what areas specialists receive further education and what motives are guided by how much the employer promotes such education of their employees.

We found that the most popular form of additional education - after self-education through books, videos and blogs - are courses: 64% of specialists practice this format. In the second part of the study, we will deal with schools of pre-education existing on the domestic market, find out the most popular, what exactly they give their graduates, build their rating.

We hope that our study will tell experts where it is better to go to study, and schools will help to understand their current strengths and weaknesses and become better.

1. Which schools are best known

In the survey, we proposed a choice among 40 schools of additional education in IT: about which they heard, in which they would like to study, in which they studied.

A fifth of all respondents know more than half of the list of schools proposed for voting. More than half of the respondents heard about such schools as Geekbrains (69%), Coursera (68%), Codecademy (64%), HTML Academy (56%).

As for the choice of a site for their future education, there are no obvious leaders: only a third of the sites received more than 10% of the vote, the rest - less. Most votes were collected by Coursera (36%) and Yandex.Practicum (33%), the rest - each less than 20%.

In response to the question about the sites where education had already been received, the votes were distributed even more diverse: only a quarter of the sites received 10% or more. The leaders were Coursera (33%), Stepik (22%) and HTML Academy (21%). “Other” accounted for 22% - these are all sites that were not on our list. The remaining sites scored - each less than 20%.

All subsequent calculations we carried out only for those schools that were the only ones requested in their experience of taking courses, and which gained 10 or more opinions. They did this because they had an unambiguous connection between the school chosen by the respondent and the other parameters that he chose elsewhere in the survey. As a result, out of 40 schools, we still have 17. As we saw in the first part of the study, almost half of the respondents said that they attended only one school.

2. Goals that schools help achieve

In the first part of the study, we saw that most often they receive additional education for general development - 63%, solving current problems - 47% and getting a new profession - 40%. There we saw how the ratio of goals varies, depending on the existing higher education or current specialization.

Now let's look at the learning objectives in the context of specific schools.

If we look at the table line by line, we will see what structure of goals students of each school have. For example, Hexlet goes mainly to gain a new profession (71%), general development (42%) and change of field of activity (38%). With similar goals, they also go to: HTML Academy, JavaRush, Loftschool, OTUS.

If you look at the table in columns, then you can compare schools with each other for those goals that students believe they can achieve in them. For example, they work on promotion at work most often in MSDN, Stepik and Coursera (35-38%); change the scope of activity - in Hexlet, JavaRush and Skillbox (32-38%).

3. Specializations that schools help to master

Further, the respondent’s current specialization is compatible with the school where he studied.

Looking at the table line by line, we will see the structure of demand for the school by specialists from different fields of activity. The schools demanded by specialists from the largest number of professions are: Coursera, Stepik and Udemy - which is logical, because they are more likely platforms on which authors themselves can post their courses. But such schools as Netologia with Geekbrains, in which the courses are added by the organizers themselves, are close to them. And the schools demanded by specialists from the least number of professions are: Loftschool, OTUS and JavaScript.ru.

Looking at the table vertically, we can compare schools by their depth of demand from one or another specialization. For example, Loftschool (73%) and HTML Academy (55%) are in demand among front-end providers, Stratoplan (54%) among managers, Skillbox (42%) among designers, Specialist and MSDN (31-33%) among administrators , testers have JavaRush and Stepik (20-21%)

4. Qualifications that schools help to get

In the first part of the study, we saw that in general, in 60% of cases, educational courses do not give any new qualifications, then the most common are the dzhuns (18%), trainees (10%) and middle (7%). There we saw that the ratio of qualifications obtained depends on the field of activity of the specialist.

Now let's look at the same question in the context of the specific schools we are studying.

If you look at the lines, we see that such schools as Coursera, Udemy and Stepik (69-79% of graduates indicated that they have not acquired qualifications) are the least likely to provide advanced training - these are platforms for adding copyright courses of the broadest orientation. Specialist is also adjacent to them (74%). Most often, such schools as Hexlet, OTUS, Loftschool and JavaRush give new qualifications (25-39% of graduates indicated that they had not acquired qualifications).

If you look at the columns, it is striking that Skillbox, Hexlet, JavaRush, Loftschool and HTML Academy are more focused on the preparation of June (27-32%), OTUS - on the preparation of the middle (40%), Stratoplan - on the training of senior managers link (15%).

5. Criteria for choosing schools

From the first part of the study, we know that the most important criteria by which courses are chosen are the training program (74% noted this criterion) and the training format (54%).

Now let's see how these criteria differ when choosing a particular school.

We only note the brightest points of the table, everyone can see the rest on their own. Thus, obtaining a certificate is extremely important when choosing a Specialist and MSDN (50% of graduates named this criterion). The teaching staff play a huge role in OTUS (67%) - this criterion for this school in general is the most important. According to reviews on the Internet, such schools as Hexlet and Loftschool are chosen (62% and 70%, respectively). For Loftschool, the criterion of the cost of training is also very significant (70%).

As you can see, additional education schools are very different from each other: in terms of their specialization, issued qualifications, goals achieved, and criteria for their choice. As a result, at the moment there is no school that would be a clear leader in the market of additional education.

Nevertheless, we will try to further build the ranking of schools based on the indirect data that we received in our survey.

6. Practical benefits of schools

In the end, let's look at the specific practical benefits that schools give their graduates. Among such benefits, we highlighted the following in the survey: the school provides the necessary experience for work, work in a portfolio, certificate and vacancies.

You can roughly see how schools satisfy their graduates, in terms of what we voiced above. So, for example, according to Loftschool, we see that 73% of graduates believe that the school gives them the necessary experience, 36% - the school gives work in the portfolio, 27% - that the school certificate helped in employment, 27% - that the certificate helped in the career of a career, 18% - that the school helped with internships or vacancies.

Over time, we at My Circle will begin to build a full-fledged rating of schools, adding the ability to rate them directly according to several criteria, then considering the resulting weighted average rating for each, as we do for employer companies . And now we offer everyone who took additional education courses to go to My Circle and add them to their profile: so that you can see interesting statistics on graduates and eventually participate in the assessment of their schools.

Initially, in the publication we tried to show not just the distribution of respondents' votes, but a full rating of schools, adhering to the following principle. We considered that the larger the proportion of graduates who say that the school gave them the experience they need to work (or work in a portfolio, or a useful certificate, or a job), the higher the quality of the school by this criterion. Then we set our weight for each criterion and added it. But readers sophisticated in analytics in the comments showed that this is absolutely impossible.

For this we have not enough data, very different samples for each school (see the last columns of the table), we took into account the opinions of only those graduates who have experience in interacting with one school, and we did not distinguish among those who passed paid or free courses, and also did not weed them out of those who are still studying there at the moment.

We accepted this criticism and removed the initially incorrectly composed rating.

PS Who participated in the survey

The survey involved 3700 people:

87% of men, 13% of women, average age 27 years, half of respondents aged 23 to 30 years.
26% from Moscow, 13% from St. Petersburg, 20% from million-plus cities, 29% from other cities of Russia.
67% are developers, 8% are system administrators, 5% are testers, 4% are managers, 4% are analysts, 3% are designers.
35% of middle specialists (middle), 17% of junior specialists (junior), 17% of senior specialists (senior), 12% of leading specialists (lead), 7% of students, 4% of interns, middle and senior managers.
42% work in a small private company, 34% - in a large private company, 6% - in a state-owned company, 6% - freelancers, 2% have their own business, 10% are temporarily not working.

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