In this interview Max Glubochansky will look back over the past year - 2021. He’ll tell us about some major breakthroughs that occurred, how teams grew and what the future holds for Careerist. Let’s dive right in!
What was the last year like for Careerist?
Well we’ve witnessed exponential growth this past year. And the reason for that is that more than 200 graduates found jobs across 27 states during the last four months alone. This is more than ever before, and it proves that our program works.
In total, we have graduates working in more than 400 companies across 37 states.
We do our absolute best to take care of our graduates, and one way we’ve done that is by hiring Career Coaches and trainers that have real world experience to teach classes. We want tutors to be able to answer questions by using their experiences and knowledge.
We’ve also expanded our team that’s there to help graduates apply for different jobs. This way our graduates get more calls from recruiters. These responses then help to show our students that completing our course(s) really does work.
Has 2021 been a great year for you too?
Careerist is a part of me, so I suppose this year has also been successful for me, as well as for many of our graduates. As a team we are always happy to see the results of our hard work, and we are delighted to see our graduates get life changing and high paying jobs in the industry.
In February 2020, ‘Job Easy’ became ‘Careerist’. Why did you choose to rebrand the company?
As Job Easy grew and we started to attract more people we found out that the name ‘Job Easy’ was sometimes misunderstood, and it wasn’t always taken seriously. And I guess, we thought that some people, who were looking at hiring some of our graduates, might not take them seriously with the name ‘Job Easy’ on their resume.
We decided on a new name in just a couple of hours. And we also thought of a new domain that sounded like ‘jobeasy.ai’ . We wanted this one because we thought that in the future we might focus on artificial intelligence. We gave up on this idea after a while. The domain wasn’t well received by all of our potential clients.
We came to the conclusion in the end that ‘Careerist’ was the best choice.
After many consultations we decided that this name also represented our values in the best way possible too - it’s about a career in IT and it shows we care about our graduates.
Is there a particular graduate that stands out for you?
Many of our graduates find jobs soon after graduating, so their stories are pretty similar. If graduates follow the instructions they can find a job within 3 or 4 months. Those who don’t follow the recommendations waste their resources - I mean time and effort.
5% of people that don’t find jobs are either having problems with their English or with getting a visa. Sometimes some graduates have trouble learning some soft skills, but we always try our best to help them. And occasionally there are factors that are beyond our control preventing graduates from finding a job. For example, if a person starts crying during an interview we can’t do anything about it at the time, but we can reflect and learn from it later.
I do remember one woman though, and she told her story a week ago.
She’s 56 now and when she came to us she didn’t have any background in tech, and she only had a high school education. She found a job in Chicago recently, it’s paying her $85,000 a year and she gets all the benefits and compensations that you’d ever like to have. In total, the end yearly salary is worth around $97,000. Moreover, she works remotely from her home in California.
It’s not surprising for me to hear this type of story. But what stood out to me was her background, her age and what she has managed to achieve in such a short period of time.
There’s a myth that roles in tech are only for youngsters, but the woman you just mentioned tore that myth apart. Do you hear many stories like hers?
I’d like to point out that our graduates can find a job at any age. It doesn’t matter if they're 19 or 60. Age is not a problem, but confidence is.
Yes, there are many companies that prefer to hire young workers aged from 25 to 35, but we teach everyone in the same way, that way age doesn’t really matter. Nobody is treated any differently. Anybody can ask questions in class and everyone can join in the conversation. It really doesn’t matter if you’re 29 or 55!
Of course, it’s an added bonus if you can use a laptop and smartphone.
During 2021 did any graduates find super high paying jobs?
Majority of our graduates get job offers from $70,000 to $100,000 per year. And that’s usually an hourly rate of $35 to $50 per hour. In 2021, two graduates received job offers of $115,000 each, for roles in Cincinnati and Miami. That was totally unexpected and a much bigger salary than usual.
What does 2022 look like for Careerist?
We have high expectations for the coming year, because now more than ever there are more positions available in the tech world.
In 2022 we will be starting new courses that’ll cover new areas of expertise. We want to help more people to find their jobs in different sectors like sales engineering, system engineering and various other areas.
We are very motivated by the fact that in the last few months more than 200 people have found jobs. We want to continue to strive to help thousands of people to find jobs and their place in the world in 2022.
In your opinion, how will the tech field develop over the next year?
I suppose that new industries will appear and the quality assurance sector will need to expand and develop itself.
Before we were testing things on phones and websites, but now people are working on autonomous machines which can drive themselves, flying machines and systems like Siri and Alexa, as well as new virtual and augmented reality devices.
In brief, things we didn’t use much before are now rising to the surface. And in doing so, new positions and new job opportunities to work with the latest technology appear on the market.
What would you like to say to your former and future students?
I would like to wish everyone a good year. And to those who are still unsure if a career in tech is for them, just give it a go. The New Year is a great time to look into starting a new profession that could earn you a big salary, and maybe you could even work from home.
Thanks a lot for such an inspirational chat! The facts and figures that you’ve shared with us are astonishing. Keep up the good work and all the very best for 2022.