Hi all,

Thank you all again for attending our Q&A yesterday. We have received ~100 questions from the group and are working to parse through all of them. In our call yesterday I committed to sharing the list of questions that were submitted to our anonymous link. I will share that list along with our answers to the key themes in those questions on March 30 via email. I appreciate your patience as we put together thoughtful, clear answers to your questions. In the meantime there were a few sentiments/questions that showed up quite often so I wanted to address those for you now.

What exactly is changing and how will this affect my App Academy day to day experience?

I want to start by acknowledging that the Cohort Instruction Assistant role was removed. This is a real loss, of our colleagues and of your mentors. We did not make this decision lightly, and did so to move resources to other areas where they would maximize likelihood of job placement for you. I apologize for the disruptions this has caused. I wanted to provide some more clarity on the transition plan for the responsibilities that they held. The end of day lectures will be handled by other staff, including a mix of mod leads, JIAs and our PTM. Cohort leads also often functioned as your main point of contact; that responsibility will now transition over to your mod leads.

Is App Academy financially stable?

Yes, App Academy is financially stable. To increase transparency, the position eliminations that we made impacted 10%, or 15 people, at App Academy. At the same time, resources were reallocated and investments were increased in other areas. Hopefully that data point will put our decision to reduce and reorganize in context. App Academy will be around for the long term.

How are the departing and remaining instructors being treated?

The 6 cohort leads who departed yesterday were part of the company’s reduction; each one was a valued team member. I can share that we are providing severance payments that are commensurate with the length of their service at App Academy, in addition to multiple months of 100% covered health benefits, an extension of tuition waivers, job search support and coaching to ease their transition. For remaining team members who now have expanded roles and responsibilities, we are increasing their compensation packages and making investments in tooling to better support them in their work.

Is the program still going to be effective and am I going to get a job?

Job outcomes remain our north star and guide our decisions. The majority of our students are on a deferred payment plan or Income Share Agreement, which keeps us aligned with your interests. These decisions were made with a focus on maximizing job outcomes from the benefit of our decade of hindsight on what has worked to improve those outcomes in a challenging job market. To describe in more detail the places that we are increasing investments, we are:
Adding an additional Curriculum team member to focus on strengthening the FT Online program
Significantly increasing our investment in the sourcing of employer partnerships–which are an especially important driver of job placements in slower markets
Adding several Placements coaches to the coaching team to directly increase 1-1 support for job seekers
Building and currently rolling out modules and workshops to upskill our job seekers in skills such as TypeScript
Making investments in software and tools for our Instruction and Coaching teams
Adding back-office support for our Instruction and Coaching teams.

I want to be clear that you, the students that were impacted by the loss of their Cohort Lead, are also the students who are going to see these changes showing up in their job search process. We strongly believe that these changes, net of those we are making on Instruction staffing, will increase your chances of placement success.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts and answers to your questions. I will follow up with further answers to your questions on March 30.


Kush Patel
appacademy.io (We're hiring!)