Today, we are thrilled to announce that more than 100,000 people all around the world have joined the Codecademy Pro community in order to transform themselves through learning. It’s a long way from where we started with an idea in a dorm room in college a little over 8 years ago.
Codecademy Pro launched in the summer of 2016 as part of our mission to empower people to transform their personal and professional lives by helping them learn modern skills. We wanted to make sure that learners were equipped with:
- all of the curriculum needed to reach their goals, including interactive exercises, quizzes, projects, and more
- an exclusive community of peers to help motivate them to keep learning
- paths to contextualize their learning and stay focused
We designed Pro for learners who know that the road to transforming themselves is long and winding — one they’ll likely take in small bursts during their nights and weekends. We know there are millions of potential learners out there, and with our first 100,000, we’re just getting started. We’re looking forward to creating better learning experiences, more ways for learners to work with each other, and even more paths to help our learners get further in their careers and lives.
We’re also cognizant that “lifelong learning” doesn’t make any sense if your partner in learning isn’t around for your whole lifetime. Pro has helped us to build a thriving business that’s doubled in the past year and has become cash flow positive, ensuring that we’ll be here for our learners for a long time.
Our Vision
When we launched Codecademy Pro in 2016, we refined our vision, deciding that Codecademy would help to connect millions of learners to economic opportunity in three ways:
- Teaching consumers the skills they need to upgrade their careers in a way that’s engaging, flexible, and accessible
- Helping companies reskill and upskill their workforces
- Connecting consumers and companies to help people find better economic opportunities and companies find job-ready candidates
Pro is our main effort on #1. In addition to the tens of millions of learners who have gotten started with programming and technology through Codecademy, now more than 100,000 Pro learners are transforming their personal and professional lives by learning modern skills.
Our Learners
We wake up in the morning motivated to help our learners. A few of them stand out to us as exemplars of what we’re trying to create with Pro. Leke, who is from Lagos, Nigeria, learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby through Codecademy. With his newfound skills, he was able to level up his 30-year-old family dentistry business, breathing new life into it and ultimately distinguishing it as a top brand in the dental industry in West Africa. Beyond the monetary value, Leke says coding helped him build perseverance and mental stamina to tackle problems methodically until they get resolved.
Julia, on the other hand, is from Duisburg, Germany, wanted to help her team at Trivago evolve from conducting manual QA tests to automated tests. So she used Codecademy to help her and her team learn the required skills. They not only increased their efficiency by 50% but also formed a new cross-functional team that took over the application development process completely. As Julia transitioned into becoming a platform product manager she studied up on Java and Data Science on Codecademy again so she could ramp up quickly and speak the same language as her engineering team.
Our Future
We’re building Codecademy to empower people to transform their personal and professional lives by learning modern skills for the digital age. While we’ve been at it for a while, our journey has just begun. Thanks to the tens of millions of Codecademy learners and the 100,000+ member strong Pro community, we’ll be working to help even more people in 2020. If you’d like to join the team, check out our careers page!
