How Will Career Services Change Now That Lighthouse Labs is Owned by Uvaro?

Three months after the announcement that Uvaro acquired Lighthouse Labs in January 2025, many prospective students are wondering what this merger means for them. How will the integration of these two, well-known Canadian tech training providers impact course offerings, career services, and the overall student experience? To get the inside scoop, we sat down with Jeremy Shaki, CEO of Lighthouse Labs, and Sheila Fung, Director of Member Programming at Uvaro. They share insights on how students benefit from this partnership with career support starting from day one of the Lighthouse Labs bootcamps. 

Sheila, tell us about what you’re working on in Member Programming at Uvaro!

Member Programming at Uvaro covers everything that happens in the classroom – course content, the direction of our programming – as well as the career side: coaching, skills training, practice, and so on.

Although I do a lot of strategy work, it’s all grounded in the classroom. I don't think I could ever step away from that.

Jeremy, what made Uvaro feel like the right partner for Lighthouse Labs? What is the synergy between Uvaro's coaching and Lighthouse Labs' education model?

When we started this process, we felt we needed to find a group that wasn't just acquiring Lighthouse Labs, but also adding and contributing to Lighthouse Labs. In this process, I spoke to many groups and people about outcomes. With Uvaro, I sat for three hours in my first meeting with the CEO, Joseph Fang, and all we talked about was people – how they grow, how they can improve without starting over, and how hard it is for companies to recognize talent without credentials.

We talked about outcomes, the importance of jobs, the tough job market, and that conversation was all about the person, not just the business model. It was the first time I felt real alignment.

How is the tech job market changing in Canada?

Jeremy: It’s definitely a tougher market than a few years ago. But I think this is what bootcamps were built for. Bootcamps were built to be agile. Even compared to two-year college career programs – by the time you're done, the market may have already shifted. Bootcamps have to adjust to the actual market and pay attention to the market needs happening right now.

There are still jobs, but it's not passive. You can't just show up because you heard tech has good salaries. You have to really want this. The students who succeed are the ones who are motivated and actively participating. Same goes for the workplace now – it’s not passive either. So in some ways, the harder market is actually forcing bootcamps to live up to their purpose.

Are you seeing the Canadian government making investments in workforce development – especially with the rise of AI?

Sheila: Yes – and not just in AI. We’re seeing investment in cybersecurity, clean tech, and other sectors. That funding isn’t just about skills training or credentials anymore. That’s where this merger makes sense – we’re combining technical training with personalized career support, and giving them the tools to succeed beyond just the course material.

That’s where Lighthouse and Uvaro together are more than the sum of their parts. We’re well-positioned to pursue these opportunities and support students across multiple touchpoints.

Jeremy: We're definitely seeing a change. The “Digital Skills for All” initiative is not nearly as heavily invested in anymore. The focus is shifting from general digital skills to more sector-specific needs—like energy, healthcare, finance. Uvaro’s membership model lets us tailor support post-graduation to help students build that domain expertise. For bootcamp students and graduates, this is a huge benefit because it allows them to improve their skills and domain knowledge. It’s something that Lighthouse Labs alone would have not been able to offer on its own. 

So the structure is something like: Lighthouse provides the technical training, and Uvaro offers the career success layer on top?

Sheila: That’s a good summary, but it’s not strictly linear. Uvaro started as a tech sales bootcamp, sure, but we quickly realized our members needed more than just first-role support. Career changers evolve. Their goals shift, and so does their definition of “success.”

As an organization, we took the time to deeply understand what career success means. Is it finance-related? Is it career development-related? Is it having access to community mentorship and/or a sense of purpose and meaning? Everybody changes and evolves as their career does. As they have more responsibilities, mortgages, kids, their sense of what it means to be successful shifts. Maybe that’s having more time with your family. Maybe that’s having meaning in your work. The evolution of Uvaro from tech sales bootcamp to career success program came from what happened to our members. Our members saw promotions, lateral moves, and complete switches – one of our members went from the oil fields into tech sales and then into a new role outside of tech. We as human beings are not static, so our definitions of career success are not as well.

We still offer technical training on our side – typically more role-specific – but our core is long-term career success. That includes coaching, mentorship, networking, even helping folks navigate layoffs or promotions. 

Jeremy, has your definition of good career services or a good bootcamp outcome evolved over the years?

Bootcamps haven’t always done a good job of telling that long-term success story. We’ve always focused on that first job statistic – how many grads got hired, the salary they made, how fast they got hired. But what often gets overlooked is how many grads go on to thrive, to lead, to shift into new roles. A good bootcamp may lead students into independent contract roles. Some people want to be creatives, but they want some tech learning. There are product managers, executives, and leaders who want a fundamental understanding of tech skills. Bootcamps have not been able to tell that success story well. 

Uvaro brought that lens in earlier in the process. And that’s been a really nice complement to what Lighthouse has built. Uvaro’s approach lets us talk about career success more holistically, and support it longer-term.

Lighthouse Labs continues to teach students that you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You are always going to be learning. This is never going to be a static career. Our curriculum itself is less important than your ability to try, fail, and make mistakes. 

What goes into the new Uvaro career services offering? How is the job search experience going to look different than a year ago at Lighthouse Labs?

Jeremy: One major change is that career services used to come at the end of the bootcamp – “learn first, then we’ll help you get a job.” Now, students engage with Uvaro’s career success team from Day One. That early momentum is key.

Sheila: Career services at Uvaro are a combination of technology, expertise, iteration, and accountability. 

• Technology: our platform, job boards, recommender engine, and a few key tools that we offer to our students and members to help with the job search.
• Expertise: our coaches and instructors are all from industry. They're coming from the places where our members want to be working, and so they bring that perspective into their coaching and their teaching. Students will learn how content applies in the real world.
• Iteration: There’s more opportunity to practice and iterate in a course or a workshop, or a live group working session. We give the opportunity to work through things repeatedly.
• Accountability: our coaches keep them to the targets that they're setting, helping them stand them up in their tooling and checking in to see where they need support. All of those pieces together make what we consider career services.

The reason we make the Uvaro career services component available to Lighthouse Labs students on Day One of the membership is because in their process of learning, there are so many opportunities to be intentional and deliberate about network development. Network development is a huge part of every job search. If you wait until the end of your program to start, you’re missing out on this window of beautiful opportunity to be building meaningful relationships and mentorship.

Once members get through the Lighthouse Labs program, we'll talk about resumes and interview prep and practice. What’s great about that timing is that there's already this momentum. At Uvaro, we have a bigger, broader job board. We also have a recommendation engine that starts going for each student on the first day, and that recommender takes time to become effective, so we want people to complete their profiles and preferences earlier to train the initial job recommendations. 

The first year membership gives members top-tier access, meaning access to all of these tools and support, plus any additional programming workshops and learning opportunities. After that, their account remains and they can still access these things, but the content that goes into it shifts. It shifts away from that first role, and it starts focusing on things like promotion and upskilling. 

What does career coaching look like now at Lighthouse Labs through this Uvaro partnership?

Jeremy: At Lighthouse Labs, we've been doing career services for our whole existence. The only way we make a cultural change is if we think it enhances it. Previously, our LL coaches did everything – coaching, admin, etc. With Uvaro, coaches just coach. It’s a clearer structure, and it’s improved the experience.

We followed that lead and transitioned Lighthouse Labs coaches into focusing solely on coaching, while retaining our employer relations team. For students, it's lined up really well because it means the people in charge of delivery are thinking about you end-to-end instead of handing you off to another team. 

It was a cultural shift internally, but the goal was to enhance the student experience. We still have an employer relations team, but now our coaches focus entirely on student support.

Lighthouse Labs students will get access to live workshops and office hours. Are there specific topics that you all are prioritizing right now that tie into this kind of evolving job market? 

Sheila: Our AI-driven Job Search Programming workshop, and not because I want them to jump to using AI for the job search. We want to help them highlight their strengths and weaknesses, and identify which pieces they can use AI for and which pieces they should absolutely not. We teach them the foundational process to use and repeat and iterate on. 

What is one way that a career changer can maximize the career services experience at Uvaro? 

Sheila: Try everything! We now have a broad bench of coaches from Lighthouse Labs and the Uvaro coaching and instruction team. I find that the diversity of voices in this process has been key because what works for one demographic is not going to work for another, partly related to skill set, partly related to network and just even the difference between who interviews well on video versus who does better on a phone call. Engage, show up, log into your portal, access all of it because it's all there on your homepage. The workshops, the courses, booking with your coach, it all happens from that homepage. 

Jeremy: If you look at peak performers, like athletes, who we regularly see on display – including how they fail and succeed – those who stay neutral can take the best care of themselves. There will be challenges in your career, so you need to figure out how to maintain a level-headedness when faced with rejections or a lack of answers or a difficult interview. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and that doesn't change for any job market.

In the current job market, what really separates folks is people who drop out in frustration. Your network can be just as discouraging as it can be encouraging. How to engage with Career Services is a very important balance that I think people need to take seriously when they enter anything to do with job search and job change.

What is one underrated skill that you would tell students to focus on in 2025, especially to be successful in this career search market?

Sheila: Having categorized the friction points of so many members, my vote for the most underrated skill is process adherence, and that includes an understanding of what process is. At Lighthouse Labs, they tell students that if you take the process and document it and repeat it, it is simply a matter of when you land your next role, not if. It’s common for people who are on the cusp of change and transformation to get a little bit paralyzed by fear. Like, is this even doable? If I haven't done it before, how do I know what success feels like? 

The most common thing I hear is I've tried everything and nothing works, and that signals to me that they’re missing or not sticking to a component in their process. If you don't have a plan, and if you aren't putting the pieces in place to track it, you will feel like you're spinning your wheels. We give members a blueprint, and the tools they need to iterate on it. We're giving them the expertise they need to get better at the things that are involved in the process. Literally, all they have to do is adhere to it. It's not magic to get a job. It is a documented, repeatable process. You just have to apply it to this context.

Jeremy: We used to say that the number one skill is problem-solving or critical thinking, and really problem-solving and critical thinking is based on having a process and understanding your process to identify a problem and solution. You don't let the panic of not knowing the answer set in and ruin how you solve that problem. If you don't end up solving the problem, you can tweak that process, but ultimately the more reps you get, the more you trust the process. That’s how we’ve been running Lighthouse Labs since the beginning. Now with Uvaro, we're putting into place a more substantial process that gives you the right routine to stick to.

Find out more and read Lighthouse Labs reviews on Course Report. This article was produced by the Course Report team in partnership with Lighthouse Labs.