• Dnipro, Ukraine
  • Education

SkillsUp

SkillsUp is an education and consulting center. It was founded in 2011.

Challenges: while working project manager at an IT company, I faced a critical recruitment problem, and I understood it required to be solved. My method to deal with this wasn’t headhunting, namely, training, internship, and career growth planning. It’s a full cycle we have now provided at SkillsUp.

So I went into the education business, and we got in touch with universities. The first students came just from the universities, and we started running courses. The first course was for Quality Engineers within the company I worked. The Business Analysis course did not need that company, so I launched it myself. I had an inkling that business analysts would be needed, although there weren’t a lot of vacancies.

When the first group graduated, they were hunted during the week, and all of them got hired. SkillsUp started with the course “Diving into Business Analysis.” Primarily, I was blogging on Tumblr and named it SkillsUp. The company name came from there at times when we used to practice with the first students within the company. I war describing this practice — what and how we did in my blog.

The website owes its birth to my student-intern because of , at a certain point, he asked me a philosophical question: What would I do if I wasn’t a Project Manager?”. I answered I would be training. And he asked what was stopping me. My answer was: “I don’t have a website.” In a month, he came to me and said: “Here you get a website and now nothing is stopping you, please, teach.”

It was a gift from him. I really loved the website. He has built the Umbraco website, and we still use it. Of course, we have redesigned it several times, and it has evolved all the time. And that’s when we got SkillsUp. We registered the domain name without taking into account the specific date but launched it on April 4, 2011. So we got the 4.04 number like a 404 error.

Further, the project evolved by word of mouth. SkillsUp has grown, and now it means the basis of:

  • IT training courses at SkillsUp;

  • the possibility of an internship at my IT company WEEM.PRO;

  • employment assistance for Junior specialists after the Internship at WEEM, we provided recruiting services for different companies.

My students work in all global companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc.

SkillsUp is the end-to-end specialist life cycle just the way I wanted to create. Many graduates return as lectures to our school, when they gain experience. Then, when graduates build their own companies, they come already for consulting services to me, for more in-depth and mature ones, to grow further as professionals or managers.

SkillsUp is the most beloved and valuable project for me and others!