Gone are the days when smart and enterprising young college graduates could head to The Big City and easily find a desirable job.

Thinkful’s education platform provides students and recent graduates with one-on-one training  in high-demand, practical skills. Today, the company announced that it received $1 million in seed financing from Peter Thiel, RRE Ventures, Quotidian Ventures and others.

“The demand for professional education is surging as jobs become more specialized,” said Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures in a statement. “Over 56% of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed, yet 300,000 positions in highly skilled job sectors remain unfilled. No longer must education be seen as a distinct period in a young person’s life. We must constantly be retraining ourselves.”

Programming and design skills are extremely valuable in today’s job market, even outside of Silicon Valley. Thinkful adopts the “apprenticeship” teaching model, whereby students work with qualified mentors and gain practical experience through projects. Featured courses include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and wireframing, among others. Tutors personalize the curriculum based on each student’s backgrounds, needs, and goals.

The front-end course lasts about three months and costs $750. In addition to mentorship and experiential projects, students also have access to Thinkful’s Employer Network, which involves about 50 tech companies interesting in hiring its graduates.

Many people have turned to Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) like Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy, and Lynda.com to bolster their professional skill set, appreciating them as cost-effective, accessible, and convenient alternatives to real-world institutions. However, the openness of the channel means the quality of the education is not always on the same level.

“The simple fact of education is that we learn best from experts,” said CEO and cofounder Darrell Silver in a statement. “Nine out of ten students enrolling in massively open online courses aren’t completing them. We believe personal interaction and collaboration with students is required, and we’re building Thinkful to make this possible for everyone.”

Silver’s cofounder Dan Friedman was selected as one of the first 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows in 2011, and Thinkful marks the first investment Thiel has made in a Thiel Fellows company. Thinkful is based in New York City. Over the past four months, twenty-five students participated in the pilot program and Thinkful worked together with employers to develop the curricula. This financing will contribute to adding coaches and expanding the number of students.

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Upstart Labs, an early stage fund and startup incubator in Portland, is continuing to churn with added funding, new investments, and an expanded team. Today, it formally announced a partnership with Oregon-centric firm Rogue Venture Partners and revealed two joint investments.

Upstart puts its own, distinctly Portland spin on startup accelerators. Just as a stout requires care and personal attention to brew, so do startups need hands-on guidance. By taking a “craft approach” to building companies, Upstart said its model is “well-suited” to the startups in the Pacific Northwest.

“Unlike a typical startup accelerator – in which a group of founders attend a ‘startup bootcamp’ together, Upstart’s team partners with companies one at a time and offers hands-on help with strategy, design, development, marketing and sales,” the company said in a statement.

The program lasts for three-to-six months, where entrepreneurs find themselves surrounded by mentors. The team includes designers, developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs that work “side-by-side” with the founders to support their growth. Kevin Tate and Joe Stump are joining Upstart as partners. Tate has 17 years of software marketing and sales experience, most recently serving as the CMO of ShopIgniter. Stump was the lead architect at Digg, founder if Simple Geo which was acquired by Urban Airship, and co-founder of Sprintl.y. He is an angel investor and already an advisor to a dozen companies.

Portfolio companies include Chirpify, MoPix, Taplister, PivotPlanet, Menuish, and Celly. The first joint investments with Rogue Venture Partners are in music discovery platform Juke, and Measureful, which automates digital marketing insight.