By Mike Rudinsky, General Manager of Galvanize
Posted on 11/13/2025
Thirteen years ago, we helped launch the coding bootcamp movement. Back then, higher education was already showing its cracks: it was expensive, slow to evolve, and disconnected from what employers actually needed. We took a different path: teaching people real skills through immersive, hands-on learning and measuring success by what they can do afterward.
It worked. Tens of thousands of graduates built new careers and companies got engineers who could deliver value on day one. More importantly, those graduates learned how to learn, giving them the foundation to stay successful for years to come.
That same philosophy, learning that leads to measurable outcomes, still drives us today. It’s how we help people and businesses stay relevant in a world that’s changing faster than ever.
Most adult education and corporate training still assume that if you deliver information, people will learn. Record a lecture, share slides, add a quiz, and call it progress. But lectures and slides rarely inspire, and they don’t demystify complex or intimidating topics. Application does. Experience does.
As AI reshapes industries and provokes both excitement and uncertainty, people won’t need more information; they’ll need hands-on understanding that builds confidence and capability.
What Traditional Education Gets Wrong About Adults
Bloom’s taxonomy tells us that the highest forms of learning involve complex thinking: analyzing information, making judgments, and creating something new. These are the skills that move beyond recall or comprehension; they require humans to think critically, solve problems, and build original work.
That’s been our model from the start. Learners at Galvanize don’t just absorb information, they apply it. They write code, design solutions, and defend their decisions with instructors and peers.
The Human Element That Makes Learning Stick
Learning happens best between people. When you’re accountable to a coach or a team, you engage differently. You reflect, adapt, and push yourself in ways that asynchronous courses can’t replicate.
We assess people before they start and after they finish, measuring progress by skill growth, not by the number of hours spent in training. Success is defined by observable performance: what can they do now that they couldn’t do before?
In an AI world where content is infinite, the value of human connection multiplies. Critical skills come from struggle, feedback, and conversation, not passive consumption. AI can support the process, but it can’t replace the human judgment, dialogue, or context that make learning stick.
Why Our Model Works for Business
We’ve always tied learning to outcomes. In our bootcamps, people with no technical background invested their own time and money to learn to code and launch new careers. The return was tangible: new roles, higher pay, and lasting mobility.
In the enterprise world, the ROI is the business itself: faster onboarding, improved code quality, enhanced data literacy, and increased agility.
Every engagement begins with a real business problem. If training won’t solve the issue, we don’t recommend training. When it will, we design programs around measurable performance, focusing on skills that transfer directly to work.
Our approach aligns with the upper levels of the Kirkpatrick Model, which evaluates the true effectiveness of learning by looking beyond satisfaction or completion to lasting behavior change and business results. We focus on:
- Behavior change (Level 3): Are teams working differently after training?
- Business results (Level 4): Did it move the metrics that matter?
We embed our coaches within client teams, enabling new skills to take root and teams to deliver faster, smarter, and better results.
Why It Matters Even More Now
AI has raised the bar for what needs to be learned and for what counts as learning. If a tool can complete the assignment for the learner, the assignment isn’t worth doing.
The differentiator isn’t access to information. It’s the ability to apply knowledge under real constraints, with sound judgment and creativity.
That’s where humans shine. And that’s where we’ve continuously operated: building environments where people wrestle with complex problems, make decisions, and get better through practice and reflection.
AI automates routine work, but it also frees people to think more creatively, solve more complex problems, and move businesses in new directions. For that to happen, people need to evolve, and evolution depends on learning.
This is the moment to get learning right—for teams, for businesses, and for the humans who will define what comes next.
Let’s Collaborate
Galvanize helps organizations bridge the gap between strategy and execution by building the technical capabilities of their people. Our model — Collaborate, Translate, Innovate, Validate — ensures learning is directly tied to performance. Talk to us about scaling capability within your organization.