What Happened to Thinkful (Chegg Skills)? What Graduates Should Do Now
TL;DR
- Thinkful was acquired by Chegg in 2019 and rebranded as Chegg Skills. The program effectively wound down in 2023-2024 as Chegg restructured.
- Thinkful was known for its mentor-driven model and genuine curriculum depth. The brand no longer carries that signal.
- If you graduated from Thinkful or Chegg Skills and are still job searching, the credential weakening makes the rest of your profile more important, not less.
- The path forward is real-world experience, a strong portfolio, and interview preparation. Not another program.
- Your skills are still real. The question is how to demonstrate them to employers who may not recognize the credential.
Thinkful launched in 2012 as one of the early online tech education companies with a genuine focus on mentorship. At a time when most bootcamps were classroom-based or purely self-paced, Thinkful's core model was built around regular 1-on-1 sessions with working engineers who served as mentors. The curriculum covered software engineering, data science, and UX. The mentor component was real: not a marketing term for occasional office hours, but structured weekly calls that many graduates described as the most valuable part of the program.
That identity built a real reputation over several years. Thinkful's alumni community was active, its placement rates were credible relative to the category, and the mentor model influenced how other programs structured their own support.
The Chegg Acquisition
In 2019, Chegg acquired Thinkful for approximately $80 million. Chegg is a publicly traded education technology company best known for textbook rental and homework help. The acquisition made strategic sense in 2019: Chegg was trying to expand beyond its core college student business into professional development and workforce training.
Thinkful continued operating under the Thinkful name through 2020 and into 2021. In 2022, Chegg rebranded the division as Chegg Skills. The mentor-driven model was preserved through the rebrand, but the organizational context shifted. Thinkful operated as an independent company focused on tech education. Chegg Skills operated as a division of a large public company navigating significant financial pressure.
What Happened in 2023-2024
Chegg had a difficult period in 2023 and 2024. The company's core business faced headwinds as AI tools reduced demand for its homework help products. Chegg's stock fell significantly. The company cut costs and restructured multiple times.
Chegg Skills was affected by these cuts. The program reduced its cohorts, reduced staffing, and effectively wound down its active enrollment in the 2023-2024 period. Chegg has not announced a formal shutdown with a specific closure date, but the program is not actively enrolling students. The career support infrastructure that Thinkful and early Chegg Skills graduates relied on has contracted substantially.
The brand graduates hold on their resume is now attached to an organization that no longer operates as it did when they enrolled.
What This Means for Your Credential
If you graduated from Thinkful or Chegg Skills, a few things are true simultaneously:
The skills you learned are real. The curriculum was substantive. The mentor calls, the projects, the technical fundamentals. Those happened. Your ability to code was not invalidated by a corporate restructuring.
The credential signal has weakened. Hiring managers who recognized "Thinkful" in 2019-2022 as a credible mentor-driven program are less likely to have current context for what "Chegg Skills" means, or to be aware of the distinction at all. The name on your resume does less work than it once did.
The alumni network has fragmented. Thinkful had a meaningful alumni community. That community still exists in the sense that former students are working in tech. But without active program operations maintaining connections, the network is harder to tap.
None of this means you are in a worse position than if you had graduated from a different program. It means you need to rely more heavily on the things that aren't credential-dependent: your portfolio, your GitHub, your ability to interview well, and the quality of the experience you've accumulated since graduation.
The Path Forward for Thinkful and Chegg Skills Graduates
Start with your GitHub and portfolio
The first thing a hiring manager or technical recruiter looks at after your resume is your GitHub profile. If your repositories show tutorial project commits, assignment-style code, or nothing since your last month of the program, the credential gap becomes a story. If your GitHub shows recent, thoughtful work (contributions to real projects, code that reflects how you actually think about problems, commit history that spans the last 6-12 months), the story is different.
Building a GitHub profile that actually gets you hired covers what this looks like in practice. The short version: quality of work matters more than volume, and recency matters more than completeness.
Audit your resume framing
The question of how to present a Thinkful or Chegg Skills credential on a resume is real. The program name has changed, the parent company is in flux, and the credential's recognizability has dropped. How to explain bootcamp on your resume covers the specific framing decisions.
The key principle: lead with skills and projects, not the credential name. Your bootcamp is one line on your resume. The work you show around it does most of the work.
Diagnose what's actually blocking you
If you've been job searching since graduating from Thinkful or Chegg Skills and aren't getting interviews or offers, the credential weakening is probably a contributing factor. But it's usually not the whole story.
The reasons CS grads and bootcamp grads aren't getting hired usually come down to the same set of issues: no real-world team experience, portfolio projects that look like everyone else's, interview preparation that doesn't go deep enough, and a job search strategy that isn't producing enough qualified leads.
If you've been at it for more than 6 months, the job search after 6 months guide walks through how to diagnose what's broken and how to change the approach. Volume job applications to generic postings is almost never the answer.
Get real experience on your record
This is the most important thing, and it's also the thing most graduates avoid because it takes longer and feels less like direct job search activity.
The experience gap is what separates bootcamp graduates who get hired from those who don't. Not the credential. Not even the quality of the program. The actual experience of working on code that matters, with other people, under real constraints.
For Thinkful and Chegg Skills graduates, this is more urgent than for graduates of programs with stronger current brand recognition. The credential does less of the signaling work, so the portfolio and experience have to do more.
Options include: - Contributing to open source projects (harder to get started but meaningful once you're contributing) - Freelance work (small projects, nonprofits, local businesses) - Structured internship programs that offer real team experience
On the structured side, getting real software engineering experience covers the landscape and what makes each option credible to employers.
Sharpen your interview skills
Technical interviews are a skill. They're not the same skill as writing good production code, which is why strong developers fail interviews and mediocre developers pass them. If you've been getting interviews but not converting them to offers, the interview performance is the bottleneck.
If you're not getting interviews at all, fix the top of the funnel first (portfolio, resume, job search targeting) before investing heavily in interview prep.
What Globally Scoped Offers for Stuck Graduates
Globally Scoped is built specifically for this situation: someone who completed a coding program, has real technical ability, and hasn't gotten hired. The credential name on your resume doesn't determine fit. What you can do does.
The core of Globally Scoped is a nonprofit software internship. Real production code. A real team. Real users. The kind of experience that answers the "have you worked in a team on production software?" question that every interviewer eventually gets to.
Beyond the internship, the program includes interview prep (technical, behavioral, system design), portfolio review, resume coaching, and job search strategy. The goal is not to teach you to code. It's to close the gap between the skills you already have and the offer you haven't gotten yet.
See the full curriculum for how the program is structured.
| Thinkful / Chegg Skills (for reference) | Globally Scoped | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Program wound down 2023-2024 | Active |
| Who it's for | People learning to code (mentor model) | People who can code but aren't getting hired |
| Core value | Mentor-driven curriculum | Real-world experience + job search strategy |
| Job search support | Career coaching (reduced after Chegg restructuring) | Integrated coaching and internship |
| Experience component | Projects | Actual nonprofit internship |
A Note on Where Your Skills Stand
Thinkful's curriculum was real. If you completed the program, you learned something substantive. The JavaScript, Python, SQL, or data science fundamentals you covered are still in your head. They transfer.
What the credential doesn't transfer is employer confidence that you can operate in a professional environment, work on a real codebase, and contribute meaningfully to a team. That confidence comes from experience, not from the name of the school you attended.
The practical path forward is not finding a replacement credential. It's building the record that makes the credential irrelevant: a GitHub profile that shows active, thoughtful work, a portfolio project that demonstrates real judgment, and experience you can speak to specifically when an interviewer asks what working on a team under real constraints was like.
If you're approaching a year or more of job searching post-graduation, the guide on what happens after 6 months of job searching covers how to change the approach rather than repeating what isn't working. And if you're unsure what the real blocking issue is, why CS grads and bootcamp grads aren't getting hired breaks down the most common patterns.
The market is harder than it was when Thinkful was at its peak. That's true. It's also true that people are still getting hired from non-traditional backgrounds. What they have in common is a track record that doesn't depend on anyone recognizing the name of their school.
Interested in the program?