Insight Launches New Post-Program Experience Funded via Income Share Agreement

Update from June 25, 2020: Insight is adapting to the new environment in 2020 and have updated some of the terms mentioned in this post. Please see our Fall Updates to learn about the latest benefits and responsibilities for members that join Insight in September 2020.

Insight is a community of over 3,000 data scientists, data engineers, machine learning engineers, consensus, devops & security engineers who have completed an Insight Fellows Program and are now members of our professional network. They work at over 700 companies across North America, with many of them working as heads of their teams.

In 2019, over 1,000 Insight Fellows completed one of our 7 programs across 6 locations & remote. Their latest placement and salary statistics are:

• 88% of Insight Fellows accept a job offer in their chosen field within 6 months of finishing the Fellows Program, and the median time to accept a job offer is 8 weeks.
• $126,000 is the average starting base salary for Insight Fellows across all our locations. The average bonus is $12,000, and almost all Fellows receive either equity or stock grants. The average stock grant for publicly-traded companies is $26,000 per year.

We are proud of the results above, but are constantly iterating on our model to do even better. Last year we ran a series of pilots on a new post-program experience that is far more structured and personalized. We saw stellar results, with members of the Insight community in these pilots getting hired 40% faster and earning $10,000–15,000/year more than the results quoted above. Fellows in these pilots who got hired quickly were more likely to get an offer from a preferred company at a higher compensation. Fellows who took a bit longer, reduced their job search by a month or more and started to earn an income sooner. We are now rolling this new post-program experience out to all Insight Fellows.

In addition to Fellows receiving the immediate benefit of getting a job faster and making more income, we plan to invest additional resources into the lifetime membership in our community. We’ve always had a thriving alumni network with events, discussions, and mentoring. Now we’ll be investing even more resources in this long-term community member experience — adding career coaching, increasing professional development training, developing our Insight online platform, and more.

In order to fund these expanded services for all of our members, we are asking all Insight Fellows to pay a membership fee when joining our community: to share 7% of their income for 2 years, only if they get a job making at least $100,000 within 6 months of completing the Fellows Program. We’ll do this via an Income Share Agreement (ISA). By setting a very high-bar for when the ISA must be paid (a six-figure job within 6 months) we’re only asking Insight Fellows to pay if they truly get the benefit of being a member of our community. Those who take longer than 6 months or end up with a salary below $100,000, will still get all the benefits, but will not have to share their income. While the expanded member benefits are funded by the ISA, the seven-week Insight Fellows Programs continue to be funded by our hiring partner sponsor companies.

This is a big, important change for Insight. We’ve worked for years to try to figure out how to get a boost as big as this one in Fellow outcomes, and we’ve finally found it. The decision to add an income share component was not made lightly, but was a clear one to make once we got definitive data showing the better results and a positive return on investment for Fellows given the increased compensation (which should more than pay for the ISA). Additionally, we feel it’s going to be even more important to provide this more structured and personalized guidance given the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily the vast majority of our hiring partners have continued to hire via remote interviews, so we expect great results for the Insight Fellows this summer.

We’re currently accepting applications to the summer session, and we’re calling every person we admit to explain this new post-program experience and income share agreement. Thus far we have seen admitted applicants accept our offer to become an Insight Fellow at the same rate as historically, and we are receiving positive feedback. We’re excited to share updated job placement stats in the coming months from the new post-program experience and would love to hear from anyone who has any questions. Please feel free to email us at info@insightfellows.com or check out the updated sections of our Frequently Asked Questions.