To our entire Laboratorian community:
Given the situation, we wanted to share with you the measures we have taken at Laboratoria to contribute to reduce the propagation of COVID-19 throughout our cities. In order to protect those that need it the most, our communities and cities, we are making the following decisions, which are not easy, but we believe are the responsible thing to do:
We will shift to remote work and remote learning at all of our sites. Our team will continue to work from home and all of our bootcamp trainings will continue online. We currently have close to 300 students who come to our centers daily to live a learning experience that prepares them to work as Software Developers and UX Designers. We are working to take this experience, in the best way possible, to their homes. The challenge is not easy since collaborative work is an essential component of our bootcamp. However, we already have had some experiences with remote learning which have started to prepare us for this challenge. We will extend the length of our current bootcamps at least for a portion of our students, considering all the difficulties we will face with placement as companies cut down on hiring new talent. Regarding our applicants, we are encouraging them to continue their application process, and we will update them this week about changes in start-dates of new bootcamps, given the current situation.
We are canceling all our events for the following weeks and as long as necessary. We had a series of events planned with hiring companies, with our graduates and with the tech community which will be postponed until further notice. We want to strengthen the use of our talent platform: http://talento.laboratoria.la, through which teams from anywhere in the world can access profiles of UX designers and Front-End Developers. The placement of our recent graduates is our greatest worry. We are exploring multiple options to find new avenues, and want to develop new partnerships with organizations that can help us generate opportunities and jobs. Let us know if you are interested in discussing this further! Finally, we will also take our corporate training initiatives to our online learning platform.
We will be sharing free online learning resources that can be useful to our community, trying to be helpful during this time of uncertainty. We hope we can contribute to new learning opportunities for our applicants, alumnae, companies and organizations, partners and anyone else who may be interested in learning in a different way and for now, remotely.
We are facing this situation with an open mind to learn. These weeks will be uncertain and we probably will not have all the answers; but we will adapt, always focusing on the well-being of our community, while hopefully generating opportunities in the midst of this challenge. Our region will be facing a very difficult time and in order to pull-through, we need to come together. It is our responsibility to implement what we know works (social distancing and increased hygiene practices) and to respect instructions from our governments.
With deep gratitude to health workers who are helping protect us,
Mariana Costa Checa
(On behalf of the entire Laboratoria team)