Skillbox

Skillbox is a Russian company that specializes in online education. Skillbox calls itself an online university for in-demand professions.

Educational programs of the service are focused on four main areas:

design;

programming;

marketing;

control.

Skillbox has 260 educational programs in total. 70,000 students have used the service, and more than 200 teachers are teaching through Skillbox. The basis of Skillbox is the remote format of education — it takes the form of online lectures, video tutorials, consultations with teachers in messengers and practical tasks. In addition, training includes offline meetings, discussions and other live events.

Courses last from several weeks to a year. The educational program ends with a thesis, after which distinguished students can get a job or an offer to do an internship with Skillbox partners. Among them: Sberbank, Lamoda, Alfa-Bank, Mail.Ru, Microsoft, Rambler, Yandex.

The Skillbox platform was launched in 2016. The founders of the company are Dmitry Krutov (General Director), Igor Koropov (Program Director), Sergey Popkov (Program Director) and Andrey Anishchenko (Managing Partner).

Before creating the online university, Krutov already had entrepreneurial experience - his first companies were associated with organizing events and selling flowers. Then he opened a digital agency, which later grew into Skillbox. According to Krutov, the concept of the new company arose due to a banal lack of personnel.

“There were very expensive specialists on the market, and newcomers had to be brought up on their own,” the businessman said in an interview with the Tsekh publication. — We have adapted to this, well established the process of training employees. At some point, my team and I were looking for new challenges and decided to try our hand at teaching. At first, the educational business in the agency existed in the format of a department, and after about a year we brought it into a separate company.”

The first Skillbox courses were formed based on the own needs of the founders of the company. The agency did not have enough designers and layout designers - these professions were taught by the first educational programs.