I would highly recommend you take your professional development dollars elsewhere. Here is a summary of my recent experience at the Chicago GA location. I completed the 10 week part-time digital marketing course. Of the roughly 14 students in the course, a total of 5 of us launched similar complaints to the Chicago office staff. They did very little to resolve the situation and were very patronizing. CONS & one PRO: · The breadth of the content was just not there - two hours per night twice a week to cover topics ranging from SEM, SEO to content marketing and paid search was not enough; while the instructor did a nice job of providing an overview, I feel strongly that I didn't walk away an expert in any of the topics let alone one. Mobile WAS NOT covered at all. · Access to data & a client should be provided by GA. For the first two weeks, I had no connections to a customer's analytics or owned channels, and it made learning incredibly challenging. Several students in the class did not have access to analytics or owned channels throughout the course and it made learning that much more difficult. GA certainly must be well connected in the tech/start up scene, and I imagine there are plenty of small organizations, even non-profits, that GA could build relationships with to connect students. As a full-time working professional, it was hard enough to get the coursework done...let alone try to convince an organization to give you access to their google analytics or owned media. As you are probably aware, without these key insights, it would be very hard to be successful in the classroom. · Instruction - while she is no doubt incredibly talented in her own right, I feel like this course was not her priority. There were several questions that my classmates and I asked that she could not answer. I would imagine that is due to the demanding and changing landscape of the field. Feedback was given sporadically, and the fact that we don't receive feedback from our direct professor on the final project that many of us spent so much time on is astounding. I know I spent upwards of 40 hours on my final project, and the rubric provided by judges didn't justify the amount of time or effort I put into the project. · Cost - I would have been perfectly happy with the course as an intro to digital marketing course if it were at the $1,500 or even $2,000 price point. I feel strongly that the $3,995 fee is far too much for the value of the course and key learnings provided. Again, I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn - and know that you get out of a course as much as you put into it, but I wanted to bring my main concerns to your attention. Finally, a couple overall notes that I definitely think need to be addressed for the next round of students: Our final class went over by 2 hours due to the amount of presentations that were required. It's truly a shame as one of the judges had to leave at 9 pm, so several of my classmates didn't get a full review. It's outrageous and poor planning to think you could accommodate 13 ten-minute presentations into a 120 minute course. Obviously, there would need to be time for questions, set up and breaks. Again, the content of the course was just a breeze over - I definitely think there's opportunity for an in-depth overview of digital marketing, but I feel strongly that I did not get anywhere close to an in-depth overview. The most beneficial part of the course was the opportunity to learn from my peers. read more

I enjoyed the free class. Nice clean area, two projectors in classroom. Even for a free class I learned a lot and I am debating going back. They offer loner laptops, but they are Mac's. I had a bit of a learning curve with the laptop in addition to the class. I was informed of needing to bring my own computer by an email sent out at 8am the day of the class. I didn't notice it till I was out the door already :( Other than the communication about the laptop I did enjoy it. read more

Great source of knowledge!!! Attended a digital marketing workshop in this location. Hands on experience. Would definitely would be back for more workshops read more

Good staff who genuinely cares about educating adults and helping them updates and take their skills further for a changing modern workplace! I have taken one free course in person and 3 classes online and they've all been excellent. Terry Rice is awesome. If you want to gain new skills and maybe change your line of work, GA is the place to start! read more

Took a great SQL bootcamp taught by Danny. Definitely would recommend for beginners! I was able to keep up with essentially no prior experience. Class was two full days with breaks for lunch. read more

I took the Web Development Immersive course in 2017. We Learned some basic HTML, CSS & JS, but not nearly enough to land a full time job or even pass a coding interview. After months and months of searching I ended up back in the same job I had before I took the course. read more

I spent over $200 signing up for two classes here, for which I never received any confirmation e-mails, follow-up, receipts, or any of the like. I left voicemails, and sent follow-up e-mails asking for clarification, wanting to know if my registration even went through, and still have yet to receive a response from anyone, via phone or e-mail. When I arrived to class, we started late and the instructor wasted about 30-45 minutes on stories and introductions. Before we even got started, 1 hour already went by. Throughout the class, more time was wasted on personal stories and at one point, even asking the entire class what we thought about his new watch because his gf and mom said it was "gay." I really don't care. I didn't pay $175 for this. I also feel he spent waaaaay too much time trying to find the right analogies for very basic, simple concepts that everyone probably already understood at that point. He spent at least 10 minutes trying to explain the difference between MS Word and SublimeText, talking himself in a circle. I almost fell asleep. It doesn't seem like he's figured out how to succinctly teach yet. Everything else that was done in the remaining 4-5 hours of semi-active work, I could have learned on my own in 2 hours max by free online tutorials. I was hoping to get a lot more out of this class. If you're gonna call it a "crash course" make it a crash course, not a drawn out basic intro to html 101. I feel like when there's that much (free!) competition out there, and you're charging $200 for a one-day class, people should get their money's worth. I don't feel like I got mine.. read more

For the amount I paid for this course, I definitely feel scammed. I have to say I could have learned elsewhere for free or for much less. The promise they make of assisting you to get a job after finishing the course is a complete sham. I followed every single step the outcomes team tells you and 5 months later, no jobs. They don't teach you how to think like a programmer they just teach you how to copy and paste and that will not get you a job. If you are thinking about joining General Assembly. DO NOT do it. You're better off taking Udemy classes (I've learned more with Udemy that with GA) and use the money to pay for your own living expenses for 3 months and learn on your own. read more

I went to a lot of trouble today to clear my schedule to take an Excel course. My version from the course download was frozen in View Only. The instructor knew this, but kept going on; totally demeaning and a big expense to my personal time. read more

When computer geeks collide! This is a fun place to learn a variety of computer skills and coding. The ambience of the place is great and the people are very outgoing. I really do not know what all takes place here but when I had the invite to go since I know someone who works for GA and explore everything it really made me interested. More to coming soon..maybe.. read more

I took the front-end development class in the summer of 2015, which covered HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript (or more specifically, jQuery). I can't say enough about the class as a whole. The instructors were excellent and available. They made the material easy to comprehend and build on. It was a good balance of "you should do this, but if you have more time and interest you can do this too." It culminates in building a website of your choosing, which is a good application of the skills learned over the 10 weeks. Overall a solid experience. I had seen code before, but had never really written anything myself. Having taken the class, I'm comfortable jumping into dev projects and contributing, and I'm excited to build on the foundation that the class provided. read more

Disclosure: I had already had pretty solid experience working with HTML and CSS before I took this class, and it helped tremendously. General Assembly was a great experience for me. I was able to learn a ton throughout the course. The instructors were great, thorough, understanding, and were always there to help if you needed it. They made sure that we understand everything before moving on to the next topic. We went through Javascript, Front-End MVC Frameworks, Sinatra(Ruby), Ruby on Rails, and a little bit of node, although from my understanding the course is constantly changing to meet the expectations and technologies that are most used. The pace was good, a little intense at times, but once you were able to digest the foundational material, everything else sort of fell into place. Pretty much everything was broken down at the base level so that it was easier to understand. They also made sure to keep us motivated and constantly learning and practicing through homework every night and weekend, as well as group projects which was a very cool aspect of the class. The staff was also great! Everyone was always there for you if you needed something, and was very friendly and understanding. I would say there were two things that I benefitted from most. 1) Meeting people - you are surrounded by a classroom full of people who are in your same boat, and wanting to learn. This makes it a lot easier, as we were close as a class and it helped to push each other and make sure we were all on track. We also would attend events together, which allowed us to make outside connections. 2) Job Fair - job fair was great, there were a ton of quality employers that came by, and I'm sure that number is only going to grow. That is where I was able to land a lead for the job that I would end up securing. Overall, I would consider the class a successful experience for myself, as I was able to land a job within the first month and a half after the course ended. read more

I took the 12 week full-time Web Development Immersive course. My experience at General Assembly was pretty great. I learned a lot and connected with some great people, it was well worth it! read more

I LOVE GA! I did the UX immersive design class. My teachers were smart and caring. The teachers took the class very seriously. Everything started on time and grading was taken seriously. The facilities are very nice at GA, as well. read more

I took the Product Management 10-week course as a digital supplement to my years of consumer hard goods product management experience. My instructors, Sanida Bratt and Norman Choi, were both highly knowledgeable and filled with wisdom and perspective in the digital space which I truly valued. I would recommend this course for those who are looking to make a transition into product management with 2-5 years of working experience in any type of product development company. This overview of product management will give you a flavor of what life is like as a PM from a theoretical and practical point of view. read more

I signed up for the Code in One Day HTML & CSS workshop. We were to go over HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The first hour consisted of general overview and elements of HTML. We also went through the whole class of maybe 12 people and we said our names and why we were taking the class (completely unnecessary, because the instructor said that they won't be remembering our names anyway because they're "really bad with names so they're just going to point at us and say 'hey you'"). We didn't collaborate with each other (and were never encouraged to) so knowing names of other attendees was not necessary. We had a 1 hour lunch break at 11:30am after finishing the HTML section and was told that we would need time to digest everything we've learned so far (which actually wasn't that difficult because the instructor went over everything clearly and thoroughly), and after the lunch break, everything would be much more difficult. The nice instructor came back 14 minutes late after the announced break. We started going into CSS. That's when I (and apparently everyone else) got lost. The instructor would type some code into Sublime Text 3 (most people had downloaded Sublime Text 2 because that's what the description of the workshop told us to do) and then leave for 12 minutes and encourage us to use Google to style our HTML using CSS. At least one person knew exactly what they were doing because they had done it before for work, but the majority of us were just changing colors of background and text. When it came to Javascript, we were shown on the projector what it's used for and told that it's different from Java. Then it came time to use Sublime to code and we had no idea what each element/attribute/tag/text was used for and it didn't make any sense. The instructor was just typing out Javascript into Sublime Text 3 and we were all copying it down into our own windows. Nobody had working code and nobody said anything about it until instructor said he would let us figure out the code and leave again. One person said they had no idea what was going on and then that's when everyone else said their codes weren't working either. So instructor goes around to fix our codes (not really telling us why they weren't working -- just fixing it for us), and then after going through everyone's codes, leaves classroom and would come back in 10 minutes. And that's when I left. Someone else left before me and I wasn't getting what I expected out of this workshop, so I decided to leave. The HTML and CSS information was all stuff I could have better learned by myself on codeacademy.com and pay $0 and I didn't think I would get much more from staying for the last hour. For $175 list price and a first-time discount of 25% off making the class $132, I felt that this workshop was a waste of money and time because instructor didn't offer information or value I couldn't have gained through self-learning online. I was really disappointed in the experience. However, I'm glad I experienced this disappointment because at least I now realize that similar workshops (and even coding bootcamps) will not be worth the money and time spent compared to free online courses where I'd learn more (at least for me, anyway). The instructor seemed like a nice person overall and General Assembly seems to offer valuable options for some people. As for me, I wish the workshop was conducted with more emphasis on collaboration instead of telling us to use Google to figure it out by ourselves. I wish the code we copied from the projector was explained in terms of what each attribute or tag's purpose was. The material delivered was lacking in substance and clarity so the 'learn-by-doing' approach that we experienced in the workshop (especially Javascript) did not sink in for me at all. I'll be learning this stuff more efficiently using codeacademy.com and w3schools online for free now. read more

Update: The person I had the original call scheduled w finally got back to me via email. I was told he had just seen my messages, weeks later. Anyways, given this would be supported/funded by my employer, I wanted to give it a thorough go and at least information gather to make a good case on my decision one way or another. (If it was my money, I'd say forget it at this point. $4k is a lofty price tag). Had my call. Many times, I requested a syllabus and stressed how important it would be to be able to review this w my manager so we could make the call on whether I'd be taking this course. At one point he replied, "oh yeah, for sure. That will also be a great time to review the employer sponsorship form w your manager so I'll send that along as well. Yup, I'll send it right away, no problem." Ok, fine. Following our call, I received no syllabus but an employer sponsorship form. At this point, I've made the case to my employer why I and others within the org should probably look elsewhere. read more

I took the Web Development Immersive course at General Assembly and it was a great experience for me. The biggest thing for me was the quality of instruction. The immersive courses are quite rigorous and Andrew and James made sure that nobody fell behind. We stayed after class every night to work on projects and there was always an instructor on hand to answer any questions. It was a very supportive environment in which everyone in the course was there to learn and took the content very seriously. In the end I was connected with my current employer through General Assembly and am and confident in the position I now hold. General Assembly not only teaches you how to code; they introduce you to the tech world by taking you to meet-ups, bringing in speakers from the industry, and acclimate you to the agile work flow. I would recommend WDI to people who take development seriously and are looking for a career in technology. read more

I had a great experience working with GA and a group of UX Design students. The amount of research they were able to gather and analyze and the resulting business recommendations made, in just three weeks was impressive. I'd recommend working with the program and hiring their students if the opportunity presents itself. read more

I would not waste money on their full day boot camp classes. I took an Indesign boot camp with someone that was unfamiliar with the slide deck he was presenting. The entire class was a bit slow and not engaging. I emailed twice about my lack of satisfaction. Asking if I could retake the class with the regular instructor. It's been almost 4 weeks. No reply. I had to resort to this yelp review. read more

I've done a lot of learning at GA Chicago - first the front-end web development part time course, then the full-time UX Design Immersive, and a bunch of one-off workshops. The part-time class and immersive were both great. I had awesome teachers and learned a TON. The workshops are usually great as well, though once in a while you get an instructor who is doing their first class ever and it can be a little rough. But 99% of the time they get it totally right and it's a great experience. I'd definitely recommend the immersive to anyone - I had zero experience in design and was able to get a great job afterwards and completely change careers. Two thumbs up! read more

I took the part-time Front End Web Development course that wrapped up a few months ago. It was an awesome, and very worthwhile, experience. The instructors the were dedicated, the staff was helpful, and I came away from the class knowing a lot more than I expected. The things I learned in class have already helped me significantly in my career as a UX designer. If you get a chance to take a class with Sarah at General Assembly, do it! read more