People from around the world come to Coursera with professional aspirations in mind and some of our favorite e-mails have been from students who have used their courses to find new jobs. One student recently told us how the Gamification course helped him land a position with a gamification company. Another student, Dawn, accepted a communications position with the University of Illinois Cancer Center after completing Fundamentals of Pharmacology. She talked about the course content at length during the interview process and now uses her newfound knowledge regularly in her new position.
With students like these in mind, we are developing Coursera Career Services, a recruiting service that connects passionate and committed Coursera students with positions that match their skills and interests.
If you opt-in to our Career Services, we will try to find companies that match your interests, skills and knowledge. If you do well in a Coursera class and allow us to share that information with potential employers (who will have agreed to keep this information in strict confidence, and use only for the purpose of considering you for employment), this could make you even more appealing to employers.
We’ve been piloting the program for a few months and results have been good! We use sophisticated analytics to automatically find good student-company matches, and make an introduction only if we think there’s a reasonable chance of interest on both sides. Recently, one of our partner companies said “the candidates we’ve gotten from Coursera are performing better in our process than candidates from any other source.” We’re working with companies of varying stage and size who are finding great talent in innovative ways, like Facebook, Twitter, AppDirect and TrialPay.
If you’re a Courserian working in software engineering, and if you are open to finding a new position, take part in this service by filling out your settings page here. We are starting with software engineering, but for Courserians in other professions, we plan to expand our Career Services to other disciplines in the future.
If you’re an employer who would like to hire the intellectually curious and hardworking students who take courses with Coursera, please send an e-mail to employers@coursera.org. We are working only with a limited number of partners for the time being, but will grow this number over time.
–Lal Jones-Bey, Business Development