Hyrise Academy: Turning our vision into reality
Discover how we're getting closer to our vision of a better education model: accessible, personalized and designed for employability.
In our previous post Hyrise Manifesto: The future of work requires the future of education, we outline our vision for a new education system that can enable people to access the digital economy and lead better careers and lives.
Having a grand vision is easy, it’s executing on that vision that’s tough. At Hyrise, we are constantly experimenting with new ways to get closer to our vision of education.
Today we want to share the main ones with you structured around our three pillars for the future of education: accessibility, personalisation and employability.
How do we make our courses accessible?
- In an effort to eliminate financial barriers, we offer the chance for students to pay once they’ve landed a job and have the financial means to do so.
- To ensure everybody has access to our courses regardless of their location, Hyrise courses are fully remote and can be taken from anywhere.
- Anyone, regardless of their background, can apply to join Hyrise. Our selection process is meritocratic and evaluates students purely on skills.
How do we personalise learning to each individual?
- Hyrise courses are mastery-based. This means all students need to demonstrate a certain level of understanding of a topic or subject area before progressing into the next. This way we ensure everybody going through our program is 100% employable. To ensure we give the opportunity for all students to achieve mastery, our programs are self-paced.
- Every student receives one-on-one mentorship from professionals with real-world experience that give individual feedback for a unique learning path.
How do we design for employability?
To keep ourselves accountable, we’ve aligned our own incentives to the student’s incentives. Regardless of the financing option they choose, if a student doesn’t get a job within 6 months of graduating, they don’t pay. This means our own success depends on theirs.
With this in mind, we design our courses to maximise chances of employability by:
- Focusing on careers with high-demand and a promising future. Low-skill jobs with predictable physical and cognitive tasks are easy to automate. This means they’re likely to disappear, so we focus on the opposite: jobs that require a lot of social intelligence and creativity. Any role within a tech company that requires interaction with the customer (customer-facing roles) fits the bill, from sales to customer success.
- Staying close to our network of employers and continuously updating our curriculum to reflect industry needs.
- Making our training as practical as possible so students are ready to provide value in a real-world environment from day 1
- Directly connecting students to employment opportunities through our employer network.
- Teaching our students job hunting and soft skills. Employability is not only measured by technical ability, and these skills play a huge role in landing a job.
