Zooming in on Avion School, the startup that teaches Filipinos how to be a Software Engineer in 12 weeks
NOV 2020 — You probably read the title of this article and thought, “Can someone really learn everything in only 12 weeks?” As a Software Engineer myself and having studied it since I was 15 years old, Avion School’s claim was very intriguing to me. Before we get into the details, for those of you that don’t know what actually happens when Facebook automatically tags your family members in photos, Google Search shows the exact recipe you were looking for, or Amazon recommends the cheapest version of the same product to you: all of these now normal activities are because of software that was once written by various engineers. It’s alarming that even though many people use the internet daily, not very many know how it works. With so many 2020 headlines regarding big tech monopolization, election manipulation, privacy concerns, the rise of cyberpsychology, and much more, it’s clear that for years: (1) software development has been dominated and designed by unknowingly bias white males from the developed world alluding to a wide gender and ethnic gap (only 27.5% of developers in the world are women) (2) too few people truly know how the internet works (If regulators don’t understand it, how can they regulate it) and (3) until recently, private companies never really focused on the importance of ethical technical design (more cash is the only success metric ideology). These core fundamental problems are sourced from a lack of education in technology fundamentals.
However, this lack of education is clearly changing with many global leaders taking part in training their populations to work in technical related fields. Slashdata presented their statistics illustrating there were 18.9 million software developers in the world in 2019 and that this number was going to reach 45 million by 2030. The Asia Pacific region shows the strongest growth overall and India is predicted to overtake the US in 2024 by number of software engineers.
Victor Rivera (co-founder & CEO), John Young (co-founder & COO) of Avion School
Victor Rivera, co-founder and CEO of Avion School, also believes that the Philippines should be a part of this educational transformation too. In a unique “pay only if you’re hired” business model, Avion School students are able to learn the fundamentals of writing code tuition free for three months with courses ranging from Programming Fundamentals to Web Development and Career Transitioning. In a brave and personal move, Victor himself dropped out of university to take part in the startup world. He says that “the things [he] was learning at school were not actually needed to build the future. If you don’t have an MBA, it’s hard for you to get hired in the Philippine corporate world at all. How does that make sense?“ When Victor began working at PayMongo, a payment gateway that allows businesses to easily accept online payments from their customers online, Victor noticed that nobody could integrate with his Stripe API’s since they didn’t have clients that could use it. Clients typically defaulted to bank transfers due to a lack of technical knowledge, which illustrated how little technical infrastructure and talent currently exists in the country. So what exactly are the requirements to join this school?
“There are no background requirements—we tell all people that they can make it as a Software Engineer. We are looking for all ages who are willing to learn.”
Aspirations are one thing, but achievable goals are another. Victor says that while it is true there are no background requirements, usually students who are more successful come from other engineering types (not necessarily Computer Science) such as chemical and mechanical engineering. This isn’t to say that all other students are incapable. It’s just a trend that Avion noticed.
How exactly does the “free” tuition work?
Let’s say you enroll in the school. Once you complete the school, you could wait a couple months and then begin interviewing on your own for jobs. How does Avion School prevent people from just leaving the program and obtaining a job a few months after attending the school to avoid hiring fees? Victor notes that when you apply to the program there are reference checks and past bills that need to be submitted along with acquiring a payslip upon hiring. There is a written legal obligation and an internal team that makes sure that payments are being handed out. While this isn’t full proof, one area of optimization would be to partner with hiring tech companies and fit candidates to students, such that going to the school automatically qualifies the students to special networking privileges or fast tracks the interview process. In this way, Avion School would be acting as a middle voice between the applicant and job seeker, both benefitting corporations with open headcount and students at the same time. This would in turn be a greater selling point for the school.
The web development curriculum track as of November 2020 (Source: Avion School, LinkedIn)
When you go on the Avion School website, there is little information on what exactly a student can study aside from basic courses in the fundamentals. Victor says that while you can’t expect the same courses as a computer science speciality at a four year university, Avion really focuses on interview heavy topics such as data structures and algorithms. While everyone is welcome to join the school, the ideal students that are targeted are people who want to transition careers into software engineering. Two thirds of the attendees are career shifters while one third of attendees are past or present computer science students or developers. Some have trouble working in a team or they are looking to work for companies that use the latest tech stacks available. That’s where Avion School has been building up their business recently, offering courses such as career advising and interview prep.
Remote class in session during COVID-19
This leads into other areas of question that are required for software engineering. The software development cycle encompasses various stakeholders that go beyond the scope of typical software engineering responsibilities. Software engineers are viewed as “builders” while in fact it takes a team of product managers, scrum masters, marketing managers, and more to make a successful product. Knowing how to interact, communicate, and understand each other’s roles and responsibilities are key attributes that can differentiate an average software engineer from a superb one. Avion School believes that the more advanced courses you pursue, the less actual coding you’ll be doing.
“Students who have already been a developer for three or more years have quick wins picking up a programming language. We try to get them to work with a call center agent so they’ll think about the big picture too. How well can you actually collaborate with your peers without touching your code?”
While this exercise is great, coding time should not be reduced especially for a curriculum that is already scrunched to 12 weeks. Programming languages are always changing as we’ve seen over the years, there’s always something to learn coding wise. Just because you can build a program doesn’t mean you know how to code masterfully. There’s a way to write maintainable code and there’s a messy way too (ask engineers how many times they’ve looked at someone else’s code with no idea what’s happening). You can write the same code in 10 different ways, but which is most efficient and scalable? In the software development world, building production code is not the same as building a program for an assignment at school. Did the student think about test cases in addition to the actual implementation? What is the rollback procedure in case your code change breaks the program? This is just within the realm of general programming, but tweaks that cater to each tech use case are designed depending on your technology e.g. modeling and simulations vs physical devices vs systems and architectures. How do you explain what you built to someone who doesn’t understand your world? In 12 weeks, I’m not sure how deep students will be able to get, but it is important that students are aware of these best practices before sending them out to the real world.
Avion School is always geared for Filipino talent first, but the bigger picture goal is Southeast Asia. One interesting long term goal Victor mentioned was using Filipino talent to try and get them hired as contractors for US or European companies. In 2016, the Philippines call center sector accounted for 12.7 percent of the USD$22.9 billion total worldwide revenue. There are currently 1.15 million Filipino call center employees with the expectation to grow and reach 1.8 million by 2022. Rather than building the nation as a call center hub, could the Filipino future look like a software development hub? Instead of taking calls, Filipinos could be taking on outsourced technical projects. Avion wants to be one of the first to begin building up that talent pool in the Philippines.
Victor and his team are not the first to have this idea. In recent years, Ukraine is becoming a leading IT outsourcing destination in Europe due to its booming tech ecosystem reaching USD$8.4 billion of industry export volume in 2025, a large talent pool of over 200,000 IT professionals, and a strong tech education. Ukrainian developers are recognized among the 5th strongest IT professionals globally thanks to their solid technical expertise, high English proficiency level (70% speak English on an upper-intermediate level), and knowledge of emerging disciplines (Go, AI, big data, blockchain, etc.). The best selling advantage is that companies on average who outsource development tasks to Ukraine additionally save about 40-60% of cash when compared to an in-house team. The Philippines could take learnings from Ukraine’s tech education and build upon it if they want to be considered as an outsourcing centerpiece within Asia.
One unexpected outcome from Avion School’s endeavors has been gender diversity within the classroom. According to Victor, “[he] can’t specify the exact numbers, but it is not a big problem [at our school] so [we] haven’t been focusing too much on it.” He says that there’s a bigger general problem in the Philippines. Mandatory education is lacking across the board and if you’re not coming from the top 4 universities locally, most companies don’t want to look at your resume. A lot of the best engineers aren’t coming from the top schools so reducing the stigma behind well branded schools and making quality education more accessible is key. There are some schools that do offer software development courses in high school, but by the time you are out in the workforce, the companies you work for are only equipped with outdated tech stacks.
There’s no doubt that Avion School is shaking up the Philippines in a bold way, and each small step towards educating Filipino youth will eventually amount to big change. Victor and his team should be proud of what they’ve created so far. As my father always told me growing up, “they can take everything away from you except your education.” I’ll be curious to see what Avion School graduates will build to better the Philippines too. To other aspiring Filipino tech leaders, Victor says:
The biggest mistake I’ve learned from starting my own company is acting too slow. My advice is to launch a product quickly and forget about the nuanced complexities. If you’re by the mantra of launching your product nicely, you’ll probably launch it too late. You’re never going to be sure if people will use your product, so if you focus on perfecting it, you’re going to miss out on important feedback or get intimidated by how much you need to get done. Don’t overthink. Just do it.
Entrepreneur Stats
NAME Victor Rivera
COMPANY Avion School
LOCATION Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, Manila
EDUCATION De La Salle University (dropped out)
