Laboratoria: a year in review
2017 has come to an end and with it we conclude our third year of operations at Laboratoria. Three years where we have worked intensely to build a new approach to education in Latin America — one that prepares our young women and leading businesses to flourish in a world where technology is a core part of our lives. Three years of infinite learning that has taught us how to build great products and a world-class team and company. Above all, three years of growing our impact, changing Latin America’s tech sector for the better.
It’s hard to put in video, photos or words 365 days well lived, but here is our best attempt to share what we’ve accomplished.
1. We gave hundreds of women a career in the tech sector
Over 500 young women went through our bootcamp program in 2017, putting in all their effort to become the best front-end developers out there. Another 200 went through our continuing education courses, learning new skills to continue advancing in their careers. We opened a new track to train user experience designers; we invested to have better learning technology, and continued experimenting around how our students learn best through our agile classroom. We managed to secure employment for 80% of our 2017 graduates, demonstrating we can have job-oriented education that prepares youth with the skills the market really needs. Today, the regional average monthly salary our graduates is over $800 dollars a month — a number comparable to what university graduates make after five years of schooling. This is a huge accomplishment for us. Our graduates nearly triple their income, having a huge impact in their lives and families, and in only six months get to launch a qualified career that changes their future forever. Moreover, by joining the workforce as software developers they are significantly contributing to reduce the gender gap in the tech sector, ensuring women are also part of building the technologies that will shape our future.
2. We helped hundreds of companies identify tech talent
One of the things I like most about working at Laboratoria is that we have a culture that encourages us to experiment and innovate continuously in all we do. That is how our placement team came up with the Talent Fests — hackathons where our students build digital products in 36 hours and companies work with them to identify, hands-on, the talent they want for their teams. We built an app to facilitate the best developer-company match, and we became a key source of talent for the best software factories, banks, retailers, tech startups and digital agencies. Today, leading companies such as Everis, IBM, ThoughtWorks, Accenture and ScotiaBank all employ our graduates. Only in 2017, 110 companies hired talent from Laboratoria, joining the over 200 organizations that rely on us to grow their tech teams and also the diversity in their companies.
3. We helped advance the digital transformation of leading businesses in Latam
In 2017 we realized that increasingly, a growing set of employers of our graduates were not necessarily tech companies, but major companies that were not born digital and today have the opportunity (and need) to transform themselves through technology. Asides from being talent providers, we started working with the main banks, retailers, insurance companies, among others, to help build in their leadership and teams the tools and skills to advance their digital transformation. This experience has been incredibly valuable for our clients and also for us. Personally, I see this as the best expression of open innovation — a startup sitting down with the biggest multinational companies, sharing our way of working — the DNA behind our impact — to help them build a mindset of continuous learning that leverages on technology to create value for their users. We trained over 500 corporate leaders who are now taking advantage of their new digital skills to build better products.
4. We built strong partnerships to grow our impact
Nothing of what we do we do alone, and in 2017 we built and grew the type of partnerships that complement, maximize and improve our work. We brought to the table leading philanthropic investors such as Omidyar Network, DRK and Peery Foundation, that not only help finance our growth but also invest in giving us valuable feedback to get better at all we do. We worked hand in hand with the philanthropic arms of major tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, investing together in building a more inclusive and diverse tech sector. We laid the grounds to extent our cooperation with key players committed to our agenda around youth opportunity such Citi Foundation and BlackRock Philanthropy. We decided to make our curricula Open Source, collaborating with the global community of developers to create the best educational content our there. We collaborated with dozens of professionals through our continuing education program. We worked with governments and international organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank to continue advancing an agenda that invests in our region’s young talent. We took part in dozens of international conferences to share our work and establish links with other companies and organizations that pursue our same goals.
5. We scaled Laboratoria to new cities in Latin America
At Laboratoria our dreams are big. We want to become the leading source of female tech talent from Latin America to the world and for that, we continue working to expand our impact to more cities in the region. This is one of the biggest risks we took from the beginning, and although it has not always been easy to manage, it’s been one of the best decisions we’ve taken. Today we are in four countries — Peru, Chile, Mexico and Brazil — operating as a small global company with multinational teams, where the experience of each city contributes to enrich the overall model. With Brazil on the map, in 2018 we will become a multi-language organization with a presence in all major tech hubs in Latin America.
A team and a purpose that makes everything possible
Everything we do is possible thanks to two things: our students, that inspire us to dream big, and our team, which being the best one I know already, works hard everyday to become better. We are committed to growing a competitive, inclusive and diverse tech industry that will enable Latin America to prosper in the knowledge economy. Through our work, we want to build a region that takes advantage of the most valuable resource it has to progress: its talent.
2018 comes full of opportunities. It finds us ready to make the most out of it!
Here a video to say goodbye to 2017:
