eso I appreciate Appreciate being here. Thank you so much for having me wrote it on a great great first question. Thio dive in. So, um, how did I get where I am today? I started with a very basic university program. Political science. I can't say anything I did before specifically led me into this direction other than the fact that I my parents, were ah, little bit of their hippies eso they had a good social conscious. They talked to me regularly about ways of they thought of improving society, improving life around us. And so even while I was doing a political science degree and thinking about different troubles and challenges education and how it factored into helping people understand MAWR gain trust and contribute positively in the societies where they were wasn't always something. In fact, my head that I cared about And then as my profession professional career grew, it all grew in marketing. So actually, I worked at a marketing agency for about seven years prior to starting Lighthouse Labs and marketing agency was very specifically experienced based marketing. So it was all about how brands and companies were connecting with individuals and creating experiences that help them understand a little bit more about what that brand represented and to me, very similarly, I saw it as education, the whole concept of educating people on your brand and helping them feel and understand your values behind it, uh, was something very similar to how I felt around the university education I got and the different teachers you get and the ones who really tried to mix in experience and help you understand what values were behind the decisions made in history, let's say, or the decisions made behind law and why our political systems are set up the way they were. There's all there's all the principal in value based behind it. On top of that, Beyond that stream of things, I had been looking at teachers in general and how underpaid teachers were. Um, teachers themselves are people who are helping our future grow. They have a huge responsibility and yet often the kind of people that we get who move into teaching, especially in the K to 12 space, where people who are under prepared to properly understand how to approach all the different situations that come from a very volatile and vulnerable set of young minds. Andi, I always thought that teachers should be paid more, that there should be more licensing and certification around it. And we should treat teachers like doctors and lawyers. All those things were kind of in the background, but the reality is, is entrepreneurship other than the fact my parents were both somewhat entrepreneurial, Um, I had I just had a very good collection of friends and one in specific who helped shape the conversation that we had prior to me looking at entrepreneurialism. And then he was actually the one who brought me the idea of starting this company in particular. Partly because I could contribute from a business perspective of marketing and understanding, marketing and sales side, partly because I cared about education on partly because my efforts were always big on trying to make things work. And I was a hustler, you know, as in like it was always about just putting things together to make them happen and delivering on that. And so when you when that was being put out there, over time, I think the idea of okay, this is potentially a person who would do well in this setting became clear enough opportunity came my way. Three consideration for that opportunity was pretty significant, but I had to decide. I've been the same company for seven years. Andi. I had to decide within a month whether I would quit and moved to Vancouver. Move across the country essentially to start this company all within a one month timeframe. I've been to the point of my career where I felt really good about it. Um, I started looking at the whole area of what coding and software was because this was the ask. And truthfully, my background was not technology at all, but kind of made me an excellent candidate for why, from a marketing perspective, because that's who we were targeting people who didn't necessarily what hadn't been in this space, but where there was huge opportunity. Eso, having looked around, looked at it pretty significantly understanding, problem and what problems we were going to be solving. I felt really good about taking a leap into something like this on immediately set off to creating a training institution which mixed in ah whole bunch around. You know, when you build immersive and intensive programs like we dio, it's all about the experience that people engage with to get past their own hurdles and their own roadblocks and really learn the things they need to learn, not just for now, but for when they go into their career and start using them and need those things need to blossom. So the principles behind them, the guiding factors that help people not just stay on learning one piece of information but growing the information they're looking to understand, Um, for me, that all kind of factored into all this little training institute that we started on. It's kind of kept those principles were kind of stuck with us the whole way through.

currently we offer we have seven open enrollment programs in which we offer a variety of coding and data programs, so we separate them into two main categories. One is re Skilling, people who are really looking to change their careers. Andi those air done an intensive format programs or Web development boot camp and our data science boot camp are two programs that help people who don't necessarily have the previous experience. Take 12 weeks in a 9 to 9 format, very intensive format and come out the other side and go straight into jobs within the fields as developers and as data analysts or data scientists or data engineers. Eso are we are re Skilling programs. Those are the big ones. That's the ones we've built our reputation on. And then we've been building up Skilling programs so more for the hybrid roles the people who actually are in marketing and HR wide writing categories that need coding and data skills. And for that we have to coding up Skilling courses, one that's focused on more of like a full stack Web introduction, whereas ones more front and focus where we see more marketers and designers, product marketers kind of move in that direction the opposite. On the data side, we have a Data Analytics course, which is really just helping people understand the concepts and fundamental to go behind Data Analytics. It's less. We do use tools. We do use languages, but it's really it's just that's just to teach the guiding principles of Data Analytics. And then we have a Data Analytics for HR, which is very specialized course working in conjunction with an association that is giving credit for what, like credits towards certifications.

I'd say there's probably 5 to 6 avenues that are informing our curriculums. Eso the first part would be our industry engagement. A t End of day. Almost all our curriculums have to lead to jobs for people are outcomes are pretty major component or they have to B two major outcomes for people on the job. S O R. Feedback loop with employers is pretty substantial. We have employer advisory boards. We have groups that we speak with that air constantly feeding insight and information into the details around our curriculum. And what what gaps there are for students that they're seeing come into their companies? That's a major component of it. The second is it's more of a leadership engagement with our curriculum. So what is changing in the market? What relevant? We have subject matter experts on our team who are always paying attention to what adjustments are happening within the subject matter. So software and data science. What languages? Air changing, What tools, air changing, what principles air Adjusting eso in adjusting those pieces, getting the feedback from those along with industry already kind of tremendous change happens within our curriculum. We adjust our curriculum roughly 5% every month. Eso constantly, we're going to keep it relevant. The third and most important feedback loop, I'd say, comes from our students. So there's, You know, when you're looking at updating courses, you could look at it as what is the material they need to learn to speak successful and how. What? How is that material framed so that people are learning it? Well, there's the learning experience design. And then there's the outcome oriented. Is this working for industry? And so in separating those on our ends, getting all the insight and information from students themselves, we have a tremendous amount of technology that is basically giving people immediate details on Okay, I don't like this part of the curriculum or I'm struggling to learn this. We track a ton of data around where our mentor support is most needed, and when it's most needed and what kind of questions were getting so that we can adjust the curriculum based on purely volume of questions. I'm going okay. These days are obviously not working quite well for people unless that was the intent we get. We have town halls with students where we're getting constant feedback from them. So our goal is to be extremely engaged with student learning process and hear back from students what needs to change, also extremely helpful. And then I'd say, lastly, we So if we're playing with industry and jobs, there is a slight variation to that which is more of subject matter experts space, which is We have big communities of developers and now data scientists who were constantly engaging with. And they're giving us a little bit of a different perspective than, for instance, someone who specifically working with one of our students, uh, and I think, between all of those different avenues adjusting and providing feedback into our curriculum. The reality is we have an amazing curriculum development team, and that curriculum development team, on their own, are making decisions and orienting themselves into what they think needs to change in order to improve our product. That and they're being informed by all those avenues, but also by a ton of the reading and the literature and looking even at our competitors