Insights, ideas, and stories

  • June 20, 2016

    Udemy helps a yoga rockstar find her center

    Yoga is a life-affirming practice for its devotees, but for yoga instructors, it can also be a tough way to make a living New Yorker Sadie Nardini, 43, is not your typical yoga instructor, and overcoming challenges is kind of her thing After suffering a spinal cord injury at age 13, Sadie was partially paralyzed...

  • June 20, 2016

    Amer Deep Gurung

    Location: Pune, India Age: 36 Title: Senior consultant When your job is to recommend technology, you’d better be up on all the latest products and services That’s what Amer Deep Gurung is tasked with doing every day at the large global consultancy where he works With 12 years of experience in IT, Amer is...

  • June 20, 2016

    Melvin Ware

    Location: Topeka, KS Age: 37 Job title: Web analyst, Topeka Public Schools Opportunity knocked for Melvin Ware, and he answered Two years ago, he was a computer repair technician for the Topeka Public Schools and the administration was having trouble filling a web applications position His boss, the director...

  • June 20, 2016

    Felix Stöger

    Age: 17 Location: Linz, Austria Occupation: Student “Ambition is the ticket to the top” Words to live by for 17-year-old Felix Stöger as he wraps up his senior year of high school in Linz, Austria, works on passing his Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE) exam, and plans to attend university next year He’s...

  • June 20, 2016

    Norberto Velázquez Medina

    Location: Leon Guanajuato, Mexico Age: 25 Job title: Extract, transform, load (ETL) developer The progression of a career these days is more of a meandering journey than a linear path Rather than picking a job or industry and sticking with it at all costs, today’s entrants into the workforce have more...

  • June 20, 2016

    Out of the classroom and into the Udemy record books

    If we ever create a Udemy Hall of Fame, instructor Rob Percival will definitely be among the first inductees His story has been told numerous times in the media, and he’s something of a legend around Udemy When he visited our office in November 2015, people stopped what they were doing and watched him as if he were...

  • June 20, 2016

    Jacek Kaczmarek

    Location: Wroclaw, Poland Age: 36 Job Title: Senior Java developer & solution architect Jacek Kaczmarek knew he wanted to brush up on his skills, broaden his experience, and become a better developer Having worked with some older software for a while, he needed to catch up with mainstream Java specs and APIs...

  • June 20, 2016

    Alexa Bennett

    Location: New York City Age: 25 Occupation: Marketing manager Fresh out of Texas A&M University, Alexa Bennett and her now-husband moved to New York in 2012 with big dreams of making it in the big city Today, Alexa has certainly accomplished a great deal, but it’s not what she envisioned when she first...

  • June 20, 2016

    James Smith

    Age: 28 Location: South Korea James Smith is a cryptologic linguist with the US Army, stationed in South Korea As he prepares to transition back to civilian life, he’s been arming himself with Udemy prep courses for the multiple network security certification exams he plans to take once back in the States...

  • June 20, 2016

    Susan “Sooz” Konopik

    Location: Oak Harbor, Wash (on Whidbey Island), USA Age: 58 It’s hard to fathom how far Sooz Konopik has come in just two years In December 2013, Sooz was suffering through treatment for breast cancer The disease took a toll on her auto-immune system, and when her body tried to combat the tumor, it affected...

  • June 20, 2016

    Cliff Chism

    Location: Haskell, Oklahoma, USA Age: 51 Back in 1975, a young Cliff Chism read about the first personal computer in Popular Electronics magazine This early exposure to computing would have a lasting influence on his life and work He also made some job moves that had nothing to do with computing whatsoever, which...

  • June 20, 2016

    Naomi DeBruyn

    Location: Warburg, Alberta, Canada Naomi DeBruyn is no stranger to online learning, but that doesn’t mean she’s always been a fan Her past experience left her thinking that online courses offered only “the absolute minimum basics, nothing that would strain your brain” So, when she came across a Facebook...