In partnerships announced this week, Imperial College London has linked up with online coding bootcamp provider HyperionDev. Across town King’s College London has revealed a new UX Design Career Accelerator program with FourthRev, building on a previous partnership.

HyperionDev will offer a portfolio of online programs with Imperial for individuals wanting to “re-orient their careers towards technology, regardless of their background”.

Experts from the coding company will deliver programs covering Data Science, Software Engineering and Full-Stack Web Development together with faculty from Imperial’s Data Science Institute.

“This is a really innovative way of addressing a serious skills gap and shortage in the labour market,” co-director of the DSI, Mark Kennedy said, a point also picked up by HyperionDev’s founder and CEO, Riaz Moola.

“With this new partnership, HyperionDev advances in its mission to close the tech skills gap in the UK and fill the high demand for tech roles globally,” Moola said.

KCL’s project-based UX Design Career Accelerator with FourthRev is designed to develop learners who will go on to improve online marketplace customer satisfaction and be able to “curate meaningful and engaging experiences with digital products and services”.

“Providing the skills and knowledge to enable us to live better with technology is an essential part of King’s mission”

“Providing the skills and knowledge to enable us to live better with technology is an essential part of King’s mission, helping tackle the major challenges of the twenty-first century,” said executive dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at KCL, Marion Thain.

“This unique program combines King’s global leadership in digital humanities and psychology with the experiences of veteran and junior UX designers,” Mark Lester, chief partnerships officer at FourthRev, explained.

“As such, it offers aspiring UX designers the chance to differentiate themselves by equipping them with rigorous approaches to understand users and the key technical and business skills required to make an impact as a UX designer.”

The KCL Career Accelerator program is the second time FourthRev has partnered with the London institution. It launched a similar program in product management in 2022. The edtech specialist also secured $8 million in Series A funding at the beginning of last year.

Expert in product and UX design and co-designer of the UX Design Career Accelerator, Kate Parker, noted that the goal was to “create a course that enables the learner not only to design and solve problems but to build an informed and balanced view of how UX fits into the broader ecosystem of product development”.

“The UX Design Career Accelerator is a brilliant combination of industry experience and world-class academia, bringing a new and practical approach to discovering more about UX and learning how to apply the skills in reality,” she added.

HyperionDev also works with University of Edinburgh, and has partnerships in England with the DfE (announced late 2022), The University of Manchester and University of Nottingham Online, in addition to Stellenbosch University in South Africa.