Why We’re No Longer Talking About ‘Graduation’

For some time now, the Microverse team has been discussing moving away from the idea of ‘graduation’ or ‘graduating’ as a sign of program completion, and instead, focusing entirely on the time to employment. We’re excited to announce we’re now doing this, and are delighted to move forward this way and continue to support students throughout their careers. We’re there to support students throughout the duration of their careers and each time they return to job searching. Plus, we are advocates of life-long learning, which is why students can always return to us for job searching assistance, whether it’s for their first, or tenth job after Microverse.

Aligning Incentives

We’re making this change for a number of reasons, but the main one being so we can better align incentives, both students and ours. As we move the focus from ‘graduating’ to ‘landing a job’ we will be able to better concentrate on what’s most important for our students and us. Thus, completing Microverse no longer simply means graduating from Microverse, it means finding and landing a job. 

Joining Microverse has always meant entering into an agreement with our team and yourself, that you will work through the program to ultimately land a great job as a software developer. This should always be our students’ - and our - ultimate goal and we’re looking forward to reinforcing that end goal through this change. 

Further, by focusing on keeping students on track from the first day they start at Microverse through to employment, we’re ensuring we provide nonstop value to students throughout their journey, so they land life-changing opportunities. 

Keeping Motivation Up

Another key reason we’re making this change is because when graduation is seen as the marker of completion of Microverse, it can be thought of as a time to rest. The opposite is actually true though, as it’s really the time to dive head first into the job search while continuing to practice technical skills and refine soft skills. 

As we have seen some students lose momentum after graduation, and then the effect this had on the length of time it took them to find a job, we knew we had to make this change. By the idea of completion becoming the time at which a job is landed, we’re ensuring students don’t lose momentum when so close to their ultimate goal. 

Continued Efforts, Continued Rewards

With this change, we want to ensure that we still continue to celebrate students' wins. To do so, we’re still celebrating course completions and have begun to celebrate even more of these. 

Students are now receiving certificates for each course they complete, such as Ruby, as well as a Full Stack Software Development certificate when they’ve completed the full technical and professional portions of Microverse. We’re excited to continue to celebrate all our students' achievements, and to do so more often.

Adding More Structure to The Job Search 

With this change, we are working harder than ever to focus on helping students land a role after Microverse. In order to do that, we’ve also redesigned the Job Searching process at Microverse to help students focus their efforts effectively, on a week by week basis. We’ve built out 12 weeks of Job Search curriculum, organized to help students maximize their chances of landing a job through a number of different lessons, submissions and activities. With this, we will continue to support our students in their journey to landing a role, while helping them further build key skills. 

It’s important to note that with this change our course and technical curriculum is not changing. It’s simply a move away from completion language that has created a speed bump for us and students and a reinforced focus and efforts on getting students to life-changing jobs. Students are also still expected to finish the entire curriculum but we want to make sure that we help them transition more seamlessly into job searching and landing new roles.

We’re as focused and committed as ever on our mission of helping talented people around the world connect to life-changing opportunities, and we know this change will help us get there. To learn more about Microverse developers and hiring them get started below.

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Header image by Nathan McBride on Unsplash