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Gladys Franco says the mission of STCC aligns with the mission of Upright Education.
“Our programs are not on the credit side of the house; they’re on the non-credit side, and they’re specifically for workforce training,” explained Benny Boas, founder and CEO of Upright Education. “So it’s people who want to get all the skills that they need in one place and then go out and get the job that they want.”
Upright offers a programming boot camp, training students in jobs like coding and software development. Through the partner- ship with HCC and STCC, there is an entirely different course that focuses on UX/UI Design.
“Essentially, students are learning how users or people interact with software and then using design skills to improve that software through research and applied behavioral understanding,” Boas explained. “So, essentially, a UX designer is what happens before anyone even writes the code or when you need to make an iteration in a project.
“Upon graduation, each program comes with digital certifications, so we work with “Upright’s mission is Credly to offer digital badging for each of our programs,” he added. “So when you
to expand access and graduate, even from our ignition programs, you leave with verified skills showing that opportunity to adult
you know a specific technology or subject area.”
learners; that aligns
Boas told BusinessWest that he founded and ran Burlington Code Academy — a with our mission to
Vermont company dedicated to training
Staff Photo
support students as they transform their lives.”
individuals with the computer-science and programming skills necessary in the same format as Upright for graduation — before realizing why Upright needed to be started: there was a big hole in the distribution of this type of education model.
“The reason why we saw a limited adoption of this model in higher education is because it just doesn’t fit into the higher-ed cur- riculum offerings; it’s on a cohort schedule,” he said. “It’s not on a calendar, and instructors aren’t professors; they’re practitioners, people that are typically professionals in a specific field that they’ve been working in for a period of time, and they’re pretty pricey to spin up.”
Connecting to Careers
Boot-camp programs have been available throughout New York City, Los Angeles, and
other big cities for almost
a decade now. Smaller cit-
Tech Jobs Continued on page 45
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TECHNOLOGY
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