The Placement Economy 📮Transcend Newsletter XXI

Placement may just be (hot take alert) one of the keys to bridging the skills gap (learn more about it here): since 85% of jobs are filled through personal networking (and millions of students are underemployed globally (but especially in high-income economies), there is no guarantee that simply releasing hundreds of thousands of prepared graduates... See more

In the unbundled model, which we seem to be moving towards, there is a wide variety of agents across the value chain that work with one another: the financing is provided by external issuers (like Leif) that take care of the ISAs, the content could be open-sourced (like the Odin Project), the community shared by students across different programs (... See more

Bootcamps like Lambda School are experiencing difficulties placing these students, precisely because placement work is not as easily scalable as the content or instruction.

In the bundled model, the training provider provides almost all services for the student: from financing (usually by raising huge amounts of VC funding) to the content (curated from existing resources, the current standard), mentor network, community and placement. Upon successful placement, the provider receives revenue through an Income-Sharing A... See more

The model seems pretty straightforward, and as education continues to “unbundle” (with more providers that can provide certificates and learning programs outside of colleges) it is becoming easier than ever to build these bootcamps: you put a landing page together, curate some existing content (the majority of bootcamps do not create their own educ... See more