CareerFoundry
Five years at one school: student, mentor, then curriculum writer.
I was a CareerFoundry student in 2017. I came back two years later to mentor — and stayed three, rewriting curriculum I'd once studied.
Teaching UX at scale is a design problem
CareerFoundry is an online UX design school in Berlin. The promise: from reading about UX to a portfolio that gets you hired — any background, any speed, fully remote.
I sat at both ends. Mentoring meant finding what held each student back — confidence, skill, communication, judgement. Curriculum meant turning those patterns into lessons that worked without me.
What I owned
I mentored across the UX program, 2019 to 2022.
- 1:1 mentorshipI mentored 300+ designers, first exercise to final portfolio.
- Curriculum writingI wrote and revised UX curriculum for 3,000+ learners a year.
- Career coachingI helped junior designers turn coursework into portfolios, and portfolios into first roles.
Every stuck student is a design problem
You can't A/B test a student — the loop is the next 1:1. Across hundreds, the pattern: name the obstacle, propose one intervention, check in within a week.
The obstacle was rarely knowledge — usually confidence, communication, or unexercised judgement. The best sessions were me asking the question that let a student see it themselves.
It worked: 90% of my mentees turned their portfolio into a design role.
I read the course like a funnel
A course is a funnel, and every 1:1 told me where students stalled. A stuck point shared by dozens is a content problem.
So I treated content like a product: recurring fixes became lessons, cuts where students skimmed, rebuilds where they stalled. 3,000+ learners a year; course satisfaction up 18%.
Find the drop-off, fix it, watch the number. Same discipline I bring to product and growth now.
300+designers mentored 1:1
90%portfolio-to-role success rate among my mentees
3,000+learners reached by the curriculum each year
18%improvement in course satisfaction
Shereen was my tutor during the course I took with CareerFoundry. Along being a very talented person and seasoned UX Designer, she also did a top-notch and in-depth job, providing me the best learning experience I could wish during the course. Shereen belongs to the best tutor / mentor / professional we had the chance to work with in the Berliner tech field.
- Mentorship is the design discipline nobody teaches. The senior designers I respect most trained for it.
- Teaching makes you say what you know — and shows what you only thought you knew.
- Mentoring at scale taught me to tell the difference between a knowledge gap, a confidence gap and a judgement gap.
- By the time I was guiding junior designers in production work, I'd done it three years at scale.