Introducing Lambda Next - Our Revolutionary New Job Search and Placement Program

Lambda School’s first graduates are now on the job market and we’ve been astonished by their success. Despite coming from very diverse circumstances and having every level of experience and educational background imaginable, every single Lambda School graduate who has been on the job market for six months is either employed in a full-time role as a software engineer or has joined an early startup working for equity.

We’re proud of that early success. But as we look at the student journey, we realize there’s an opportunity for our career services team to reach a level no one has ever seen before.

Today we introduce Lambda Next - our revolutionary new job search and placement program.

What is Lambda Next?

Entering the job market can be intimidating and confusing, especially if you’re looking for your first job in a new field.

To that end, we’re taking the same full-time structure, support, guidance, and direction we give during the classroom portion of Lambda School and applying it to the job search. Most students consider Lambda School to be one of the most challenging and productive times of their lives, and now that will carry through into looking for a career.

Lambda Next has its own team of Career Services experts and assistants on staff, and follows the same full-time schedule as Lambda School proper (8 am to 5 pm Pacific).

Every week includes:

• Writing code every day, with frequent code reviews from a “career sherpa”
• Contributing to popular open source projects
• Writing technical blog posts
• Attending meetups
• Frequent interview practice

And, of course

• Sourcing jobs, networking, applying, and interviewing

Introducing our Outreach Team

In addition to the individual support we provide every student, we are building an outreach team whose full-time responsibility will be cultivating relationships with other companies that believe in our mission, share our values, and are excited to bring Lambda School students onto their teams.

Getting Results

By the time a student gets to the end of Lambda School they’ve spent over 1,200 hours learning how to code. That is a good start.

If a student were to last in Lambda Next for six months without getting hired, they would have:

• Written code every day for over 1 year
• Completed at least 8 finished portfolio pieces and contributed to dozens of others
• Contributed to some of the largest open source projects and published several NPM packages
• Written at least 13 technical blog posts
• Attended at least 13 meetups, presenting at 6
• Submitted at least 1,300 job applications

Suffice it to say we fully expect every Lambda School graduate to be hired well inside of six months.

If, for any reason, a student has fully participated in Lambda Next and isn’t hired within six months, they have the full commitment of the careers team at Lambda School and both of its co-founders: We will drop anything and everything we’re doing and do nothing else until that student is employed. Again, we don’t expect students will reach that point, but if they do they will become the highest (if not only) priority in the company.

If you are a student who shows up and works hard, we will never give up on you. Ever.

Yours,

Austen Allred, Co-Founder and CEO

Ben Nelson, Co-Founder and CTO

Ryan Holdaway, VP of Outcomes