How Tigran Sloyan and CodeSignal keep up with in-demand tech skills

You might be surprised to find out that Tigran Sloyan, the founder of an online learning platform, didn’t like school.

He did love math, though. As a youngster in Armenia, Sloyan preferred regional, national, and international math competitions to the classroom.

“Math competitions sparked in me an interest in learning, because it felt more like a game and a competition—something that spoke to the competitive, disagreeable, and extroverted nature that I had,” Sloyan recalled.

Along an academic and professional path that included math medals, an MIT education, and stints at Big Tech companies like Oracle and Google, he saw problems with how talent is developed and discovered.

Now, as co-founder and CEO of AI-native skills platform CodeSignal, Sloyan sees a need for tech talent to rely less on degrees and résumés, and more on a clear answer to the question: What are your real skills?

Thanks to advancements in AI, in-demand skills are changing fast. Sloyan and the CodeSignal crew want to help test and develop skills of the future, via assessment tools that keep up with emerging technology.

Assess is in session. CodeSignal is a learning platform that also provides hands-on skills assessments that employers can integrate into their hiring process. An employer interviewing a software developer, for example, can incorporate a simulated development environment with a built-in terminal, file system, and whiteboarding tool. The platform also addresses non-technical skills like active listening with the help of simulated chatbot partners.

Founded in 2015, CodeSignal’s early assessments included skills like data management and analysis, given companies’ increasing use of telemetry within tools. A decade later, Sloyan said assessments like “AI literacy” are the most popular amongst employer customers.

MIT follows. Following his early medaling in competitions like the International Math Olympiad, a peer wrote “mit.edu” on a Post-it note and told him to apply.

“I was like, ‘What's MIT?’ And he looked at me as if I had just landed from Mars,” Sloyan said. Sloyan later received a full scholarship and ended up in Boston to start the next part of his education—another learning experience that he feels grateful for, while noting the restrictive shortcomings in a university education.

“I did get reminded again that I don’t like traditional schooling and that traditional schooling is designed for a specific personality and specific behaviors that do not really speak to everybody,” he told IT Brew. “It’s a funnel that is essentially trying to kick people out at an extreme pace where very few people make it to the end of that funnel.”

Rezzy does it. Following his graduation at MIT, he became an application manager at Oracle and a partner technology manager at Google. As he worked with his Google colleagues to find talent, he remembers some applicants—fellow math competitors, he said, whom he knew were brilliant—weren’t even getting called in due to a lack of certain types of experience (say, an MIT education) on their résumé.

Sloyan saw a major weakness in how companies harness and find talent if certain skills aren’t easily presentable on a résumé. Inspired, he quit Google with a dream to shake up the market for skills assessment and development.

“What does it take to take the world beyond résumés and help every human live up to their potential? It’s a very complex problem that I’ve dedicated the last decade of my life to solving,” Sloyan said.

Urgent requests. A July 28 report from recruiting site Glassdoor found that AI jobs, despite being “a small portion of all job postings,” increased 53% YOY in 2025. And candidates have multiple learning options—including certifications, degrees, and self-teaching key skills—as they compete for jobs in this evolving space. A study from educational services company Pearson, released in April 2025, found that 35% of job candidates planned to earn an AI certification in 2024, up from 17% in 2022.

However, companies are often unsure which candidates have mastered the requisite AI skills, and many are maintaining a narrow focus when it comes to screening for talent, often more interested in degrees than skills. For example, a June 2025 study from National University saw that “more than three-quarters of AI job openings give preference to candidates with a Master’s degree.”

Sloyan says ongoing conversations with employer partners, combined with market research and skills-gap analyses, are key to developing skills assessments that actually match the current pace of AI development.

“We find ourselves in 2025 and we're seeing breakthroughs every year, sometimes every six months, and university curriculum is typically changed like once a decade at best, if at all,” he said.

One of CodeSignal’s most recent offerings for employers is an agentic assessment. CodeSignal simulates the core working environment, complete with conversations, coding, and whiteboard options, so interviewees can evaluate the quality of AI agents. Some assessed skills for AI agent-building include task decomposition and workflow planning, programmatic validation and quality assurance, and prompt design.

“Everybody is trying to understand how to build AI agents that are going to perform highly useful tasks within their organizations. So, there is a massive demand for this,” Sloyan said.

CodeSignal also provides more hands-on options (including an AI tutor named Cosmo). “All of us learn skills through practice, and it just engages our brain more when you do things hands on,” he said. “Everything we do from a CodeSignal perspective comes down to doing things with your hands, and not just being a passive observer.”

Sloyan hopes those modules don’t feel too much like school.