Tech skills: a huge opportunity for Latin America

Tech employment opportunities are expected to increase 12% by 2024, according to a report from Modis. Tech skills include a vast range of competence, such as programming (in many languages), digital transformation, data science, design, and artificial intelligence.
By living in Guatemala, I can clearly see how there is a lot of talent but not enough growth opportunity. People are eager to learn any new skill that can improve their lives by getting higher-paying jobs. A good example is the Latin American contact center industry, which has taught us in the past years how we can add value to the global market, by learning a specific skill.
The Latin American contact center industry is now a $9.5 billion industry and expected to reach $13.5 billion in 2022, according Frost & Sullivan’s research. The main drawback is that it still has a big dependence on the voice channel, implying that most of the 800,000+ agents are restrained with limited growth opportunities. There is a huge potential of this industry in transitioning into tech skills.
At Buildawow we are trying to give access to this skill tradeoff. We are doing this by teaching tech skills and only charging the price of the course if the students find a better job after graduating (with our help). We like to call our students creators because we believe that learning a specific skill will make them capable of adding value to any company.
Yesterday, we started our first course, and we are teaching front-end web development to ten people. Our objective is to complete the course in three months with this group of creators, giving them all the tools needed to start working on real-world projects. They have different experiences and learn at different paces, but we are sure they all can to add value with this new skill.
In this course, we are exploring HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which gives the basic structure of a website; CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is used to control the design; and JavaScript, which gives the functionality to the website. We strongly believe that learning these three languages is key to starting as a web developer. They are fundamental to understanding other frameworks, and it can be very helpful in learning back-end development later on.
As part of the course we are also focusing in the adoption of tools commonly used in real-world tech companies, so the creators can start getting used to them. We are giving them the mindset to adapt to the constant technological changes in the industry. They are creating a portfolio to demonstrate their ability to solve problems and show their creativity. We are helping them improve their interpersonal communication and teamwork skills, which will be highly valued by the potential hiring companies.
We plan to expand the number of creators and skills to be taught as soon as we validate that they are “job ready”. We have seen a big demand for specific-skills jobs, by running a software agency for the past four months. So, we are pretty confident that the people with the attitude to learn will be able to get a higher-paying and better growth opportunity job!

