Tech careers development academy for teenagers

LatAm produces less than 100k STEM grads each year, however around two million tech jobs in LatAm go unfilled each year, just 12% of the 250 million people in age or conditions to assist in college, made it. and only 20% of those students come from the 40% poorest sections of society. Learning a profession is the greatest privilege.

The new inequality in the world is between those people who have the complex skills to contribute and adapt to change, and those who do not have it.  As in many places around the world, in LATAM the high schools are not preparing students for the 21 century and do not have enough capability to quickly adapt to face all the challenges due to technological advances.  Many parents are concerned about their child’s future. That's why, they are looking for complementary activities to provide their children with the skills required by the new professions. Just in Latin America there are around 156 million teens and kids enrolled in school,

We provide a hyper gamified experience on tech career programs through on-demand courses and weekly live group sessions led by mentors.

How it works? 

People subscribe to the program choosing available days and times to learn.

Then in the platform, students find on-demand courses based on microlearning and project-based learning methodologies. 

Mentors meet student groups in weekly live sessions (twice per week) to make reviews and propose collaborative activities to achieve small goals to advance with the course.

The program has a progressive learning path composed of 4-semester levels that go from 0 to Pro. In the beginning, students must go through a discovery stage, where they learn the fundamentals of different tech disciplines such as programming, electronics, 3D modeling, multimedia, among others. Then they specialize in the area that they liked the most and at the last stage, they get involved in real projects to validate their knowledge.

You can see a demo video here: 

For now we are focusing on teenagers from LatAm, however in the future we plan to start teaching tech abilities and soft skills from early ages and open operations in other regions such us Africa and India.

VinciU will become the essential complement in education for the professional success of every child in developing countries regardless of the academic path they choose to follow. 

 Understanding teens' motivations is not an easy job as well as applying the right methodologies that work better for them and knowing how to apply the right dynamics to show in the courses. It took us time to analyze and we have much to improve.

Also, we have already spoken with hundreds of parents to know their pains and gains. This is not something you get just by implementing a new service.

- Francisco has 5 years of experience as a founder in educational business. 

- Franco and Cristian not only are great programmers, but also they are just 20 years old and they are very close to our users. 

- We complement each other in technical, design and selling skills. 

- We have developed VinciU's platform from sratch based on stdents feedback.

- As founders we share values, vision and enjoy a lot what we are doing,

- We invented the first platform of workforce development focused on under 18.  

- We have had 1 and 1 talks with more than 400 parents. Most of them actively seek a better future for their children.

Summary of VinciU's history

By Fran Dominguez CEO

I've been working on this project for 5 years. After I failed a 3D printer factory I started bootstrapping the idea in 2018 when I opened my own tech school (of programming & robotics) for kids and teenagers called Instituto Vinci (https://www.institutovinci.com/) where I lead a team of 23 people and more than 350 enrolled students enrolled. This experience let us closely study our clients and users, to understand pains, gains and customer jobs from parents and the motivation of our students. In that time we created and proved part of the program and some methodologies we use nowadays. By June of 2020, Franco and Cristian joined the team as class instructors. Tthey were not only lifelong school partners who carried out many projects together but also they showed super-high coding skill sets as well as the high capacity to lead, learn, and enthusiasm and responsibility every project needs, so I knew they were the right persons that I was looking for years.  Then we aligned the vision and formed the founders' team to build VinciU.

Digital education is an urgent need to make impactful changes, we need the to be surrounded by best community to grow fast. 

We are innovating in the market segmentation of workforce development which is normally aimed at college students or professionals who seek to improve their working conditions. We tailor the content with a longer learning curve to target the market for youth still attending high school.

In this way, we are training young and promising talent capable of working or undertaking in the tech industry at an early age.

For the next year we want to scale rapidly and boost students from different countries from LATAM.  For the next five years we want to generate a tech culture change in the region, encouraging an ecosystem of future entrepreneurs who contribute to the social development of future generations. And if possible, become an alternative to the traditional educational system.

Our moonshot is to guide over 10 million teenagers to the tech industry in each region we operate.

How do we plan to achieve that? 

Despite being a B2C company, we know that our market is concentrated in schools, which is why, as a growth strategy, we are signing non-commercial agreements with private schools and governments to provide free benefits such as an educational and management suite tools from our own infrastructure in order to obtain data and publicity within the schools community. Also, we provide special discounts to school students to access our programs

We can measure absolutely all the interactions of our users with the platform. That makes us a data-driven company. This allows us to make decisions based on that data.

Our north star metric is the completion rate. Today is up to 80>#/i###

Theory of change VinciU
Activities:
We offer an educational program in technology for teenager to learn based on projects and at an early age. They learn about different tech disciplines and then specializing in one of them.

Outputs:
VinciU students develop Soft Skills (such as creativity, teamwork, communication and critical thinking) and Hard Skills in areas of accessible technologies such as 3D modeling, programming, web development, electronics, among others.
The combination of these skills gives them the ability to adapt to change, learn new things and maintain mental balance in situations with which they are not familiar.

Short Term Outcomes
Students who went through the program have complex skills to get  into the tech industry playing creative roles within organizations, as well as achieve a clear orientation of what they are going to study at the university. This allows them to become independent and even to contribute to their families.

Long Term Outcomes
An ecosystem of young talent will be generated by contributing and creating solutions from the region, favoring the growth of the industry and thus the substantial improvement of the region's economy.

Goal: Insert developing countries teenagers into the tech industry to contribute to the regional knowledge economy.

vinciu.com is our own platform developed from scratch based on Angular 11 and Firebase. within it, we have different integrations with existing platforms such as zoom, discore, telegram, among others.

Our team is balanced between men and women. In addition, our platform was designed so that girls can feel comfortable learning about technology. the colors we use, the teachers for the ondemand videos, etc. 

We care about diversity.

To be part of the VinciU program, our business model is a subscription model. We charge between $40 and $75 per month, depending on the plan the customer chooses. 

Our cohorts have between 20 and 35 students

We are financially sustainable from day 1. Per cohort we receive around $1,500 and spend less than $300 on it, our margin is around 80%. This makes us profitable and allows us bootstrap the company grow

We charge 50 dollar per student per month, then we pay the instructor 20 per hour. We have on average 25 students per cohort, the students receive companionship by two live group lessons per week. The rest is on demand. 

The key to achieving financial sustainability is to get more cohorts, that's all.