0.0 Background

Laboratoria is a non-profit organization in Latin America. Laboratoria started as a coding bootcamp for young women with high potential but limited economic opportunities in Latin America. After successfully graduating more than 600 web developers, Laboratoria was ready to start the diversification of its educational offering in order to generate a greater impact. The new track would be UX Design. In 2017, I led this project with the goal to create the best UX Design bootcamp in Latin America. 

0.1 TL:DR

Laboratoria’s UX Design track started in the August 2017 in Lima 🇵🇪, Santiago de Chile 🇨🇱 and Ciudad de Mexico 🇲🇽; and has graduated more than 500 UX Designers at the end of 2022 with a job placement rate of over 80%. This new track started after testing and measuring 2 “class prototypes”: a class for graduates and a 1 month full-time class in Lima.
 

Obvious note: This is an ongoing process, in a constant loop of execution, measurement and iteration. During 2020, we leveraged the impact of the pandemic to create the best remote learning experience for our students.

1.0 Understanding the landscape

Interviews

As part of the research I interviewed with many experts in the field.

• From the UX Design Bootcamp at General Assembly I interviewed one of the first instructors, who has taught several iterations of this bootcamp, and a graduate from the Seattle location.

• Experienced designers, with almost 20 years working in the field, from Google Ventures as Michael Margolis and Daniel Burka gave their point of views of design education.

Students are also a very important part of this ongoing research, we interview them frequently and try to be close to them. From them we learned about their expectations, motivations and struggles with design education.

Lead designers from hiring companies, who  are in charge of deciding whether a designer joins their team. These designers showed how they hire designers, what they look for in a designer, and the complications with the current lack of offer.

Look at references and competition

Who is teaching Design or UX Design and has more experience than Laboratoria? What can we learn from them? As part of the research process we revised some design curriculums from other institutions and even visited the d.School at Stanford to get some inspiration.

Also conducted desk research watching and listening to many interviews from leaders in the field such as Jared Spool, founder of Center Centre a Design School in the US, and Paul Sherman, a PHD who has made a complete research on the skills necessary in a UX Designer. 

Past experiences

Went back to our first pilots and gather our learnings. What went good? What can we do better? 

Always feedback

Constantly meeting with graduates in order to understand what concepts and tools they use in their work, so we can make some adjustments in our bootcamp.

2.0 Learnings

• Soft skills are most important than tech skills. We knew that soft skills were important for a UX Designers, but we realized that they were even more important than we thought. As we were talking to mentors and companies they all mentioned soft skills more often than technical skills.
   

• Judgement (critical thinking) is something that we need to embrace. Students must learn to decide among the tools they have available they need to decide critically when they should use any of them and why. The same happens when we talk about the design process. 

  
  

• Practice and repetition are the base of our learning. We've seen in our first pilots that when some activities are repeated the learning is higher. For example, when we practiced interviews several times, the performance of the students interviewing was better than when we did it only once. 
   

• Some topics are difficult to understand the first time, if you know it transmit it to the students so they don’t feel anguish. We have realized that when we tell the students that a topic is difficult to understand and that they will understand it after a couple of exercises their anxiety is diminished and that helps in the learning experience. 
   

• Seniority is defined by the number of projects that a designer has worked on rather than the years of experience that she might have. So we need to add as many products as we can for the students to work on, so they can build their seniority and their capabilities, which will result in better jobs and salaries.

3.0 Results 

Laboratoria has graduated more than 500 students. More than 80% of these graduates have gotten UX Design jobs and have tripled their incomes, and are now working in big companies such as BBVA, IDB or Google, consultancy companies like Everis or Globant and high growth start ups like Yalo.