Learning Real Life Skills That Matter

Codecademy is premised on the idea that everyone can — and should — learn how to code. Now with over 25 million users worldwide, including New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg to governments and educators in the UK, Buenos Aires and Estonia, Zach is well on his way to accomplishing his founding goal of teaching people of all ages the skills they need to find and keep jobs in the 21st century.

We interviewed Zach in November 2014. We asked him about the winning formula of Codecademy, the growing importance of learning how to program and what lies ahead for the future of education as we know it.

PIL: In our interviews with 63 recent graduates from 10 different U.S. colleges and universities earlier this year, Codecademy came up in conversations as a go-to learning resource. Why do you think Codecademy is popular among recent college graduates? In a larger sense, what would you say is the single most important reason that Codecademy is one of the best places to learn, no matter what someone’s age or skill level is?

Zach:  Ryan and I started Codecademy while still in college. As a political science student at Columbia I was getting what’s considered an impressive education, but like most of my peers was on track to graduate without any hard, employable skills. Ryan, on the other hand, had studied computer science – a supposedly employable major – and still found it necessary to reeducate himself before interviewing at tech companies. We designed Codecademy to be the easiest way for someone of any background to learn how to code, but it might be unsurprising that it appeals to people experiencing the problem that lead us to create Codecademy in the first place: traditional four-year colleges are still not equipping students with the skills the workplace demands.

There’s a lot of talk about revolutionizing the four-year education that’s prevalent in America. But the vast majority of what we call online education is traditional education re-packaged for the web. Most MOOCs videotape traditional college lectures and make them available online. They’ve used the Internet to make education more accessible, but haven’t tested the boundaries of what web-based learning could look like. Ryan and I set out to build an education experience that was truly web-native. We built a chunked, gamified, learn-by-doing teaching environment. I think it’s that experience that makes Codecademy most valuable for people of any age and education level, and for the first web-native generation in particular.

PIL: You have been quoted as saying, “Programming is the only skill that guarantees you employability” and that it can be learned outside of college. Would you say the ability to code has become an even more pressing job skill since you started Codecademy? How will you ensure that Codecademy remains at the forefront when it comes to providing people with skills they will need as the job market continues to change?

Zach: When Ryan and I started Codecademy, we confronted a lot of doubt that coding could ever be considered a mainstream skill. Who wants to learn to code? Who cares?  Only a few years later, eleven year olds daydream about developing apps (and in some cases do it). Toddlers sit at dinner tables playing on their parents’ iPads. As we spend more and more time interacting with software the spotlight has turned to programming and programming education. America is not as far on this development path as countries like England, which has declared code a new form of national literacy by requiring it be taught in all elementary schools. But Americans are equally subject to the fact that as more and more work becomes digital, programming will become a required skill for more workers – not just in tech but across every sector of the economy.

Coding bootcamps – intensive, in-person coding courses, often with high price tags – have been able to turn novices into employable programmers in as little as 12 weeks. As more people interact with technology, particularly software, bootcamps have demonstrated how quickly beginners can be turned into employable programmers. They’re making people aware of a thesis that caused Ryan and myself to start Codecademy in the first place: for web development jobs, skills matter more than education credentials, and a four-year education isn’t needed to teach them.

PIL: Codecademy’s mission statement declares, “education is broken.” This sentiment is shared by many Americans as students across the country exit the formal education system in debt and unable to find employment. When asked about your decision to drop out of Columbia after your junior year, you said that a traditional education “is right for a certain type of person. But we’re lying to ourselves about [a four-year] college being the only form of postsecondary education.” Based on your experiences, both as a student and an educational innovator, how should we be thinking about the future of higher education? If there were just two things you could fix about higher education in the U.S., what would they be?

Zach: The national ecosystem that is American higher education grew out of a small system originally designed to educate the country’s elite. Though strides were made to open up American higher education in the last century – notably, with the influence of the GI bill – it remains an unwieldy and ineffective solution for the country as a whole. The majority of Americans graduate with over $33,000 in debt. From a financial perspective, the current four-year system is damaging and unnecessary for these students. Worse, it’s also not delivering on its most basic, implicit promise: four-year education is failing to provide most students the skills they need to find jobs.

I think anyone serious about educational reform has two main goals: (1) to create education that’s more accessible and, (2) to make it better able to provide students with the skills the economy demands. What people tend to be less likely to focus on is how universities teach. Though the lecture system is used almost universally, there’s actually no evidence that it’s a good way to learn. (Most evidence, in fact, points to the contrary.) I think anyone looking not just to reform education but to innovate is reworking access, availability, and curriculum, and also focusing on reshaping how American colleges teach and how students learn.

PIL: In 2013, Codecademy went international, extending its efforts to increase computer literacy. Resources have been provided to U.S. educators to help teachers become computer science educators. You have teamed up with France’s Libraries Without Borders to help raise literacy levels. What prompted your company to undertake these programs? How do you see open online resources like Codecademy partnering with organizations for lifelong learning, like community centers, libraries, and museums?

Zach: Starting this fall, The United Kingdom mandated that code be taught to all elementary and high school students. England and countries like Ecuador and Estonia are ahead of the pack in their commitment to teach programming to their populations.  We’re honored to be partnered with the first wave of countries teaching code to the next generation on a national scale.

PIL: You have co-founded one of the most-talked companies in education today. With 25 million users worldwide and growing, you and Ryan Bubinski have started a revolution in educational instruction, lifelong learning resources and computer literacy around the globe. What innovations now underway by other thought leaders are you excited about?
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Zach: Ryan and I started Codecademy to try to fix some of the issues with American education. We looked at the skills gap, that the majority of college students in America graduate with debt, that 50 percent of them are unemployed or underemployed, and tried to figure out what area could most benefit from innovation. Every year America produces 100,000 more programming jobs than it does computer science graduates. Work in web development pays an average of $82,000 a year. The economic potential – even over just the three and a half years that Codecademy has been in existence – is huge. We’re committed to changing the way the world learns to code, and believe coding will only get more important in the future. That said, our focus has always been on education at large. If it turns that humans start populating space and material sciences become the most important educational frontier, we might just move there, too.

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Zach Sims lives in New York City. In 2012, TIME Magazine selected Codecademy as one of its Top 50 Websites. Forbes Magazine has named Zach to their respected “30 Under 30” lists. Before founding Codecademy, Zach worked at AOL as a summer associate and started several eBay businesses.

Smart Talks are information conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of educating and preparing college students and graduates to succeed in the workplace and as lifelong learners in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series, produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). 

This interview with Zach Sims was made possible with the generous support of a research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), creating strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.

Zach Sims: “Learning Real Life Skills That Matter” (email interview), by Sarah Evans, Kristine Lu and Alison Head, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 22 (12 January 2015), is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.