We recently connected with Maca Baigorria and have shared our conversation below.

Maca , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

This mission first took root when I decided to make my own UX/UI career pivot. I chose to learn UX/UI independently and quickly realized how challenging it was to gather these skills without guidance.

After building my successful UX/UI career, I saw an opportunity to make the field more diverse. I wanted to create an affordable and accessible program to help others start their own UX/UI careers – and so, Avocademy was born.

We aim to further our mission and bring more UX/UI opportunities to our diverse audience.

Maca , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Avocademy is an educational program that helps people transition to the UX/UI design field through an affordable and short curriculum. Since we launched our UX/UI Foundations Program in 2020, we’ve mentored hundreds of students, added new course offerings, and grown our team exponentially.

It’s our goal to create an affordable way for newcomers from all backgrounds to join the next generation of UX designers. We also offer a Career Jumpstart program which provides students with tailored job search assistance to ensure their long-term success. Our mission is to create an accessible and inclusive educational program that enables anyone to break into the UX/UI field.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Most definitely. During the height of the pandemic, I, like everyone else, found myself with a lot of extra time at home, and it finally gave me the freedom to turn my dream into something real. I always knew I wanted to start Avocademy – I just didn’t know then exactly what it would look like. So my side business began little by little. First, I did some research to confirm the need was out there. And it was! The pandemic gave everyone some time to think about what mattered, and we saw many people want to change careers, specifically break into tech. Then I slowly started putting together some resources, which evolved into a curriculum. It scaled slowly at first, which is when I brought on my best friend part-time to help with the admin side of things. When it was time to hire our first full-time Sales Development Representative, I knew this was going to be big. I’d say that my first full-time hire and bringing on my best friend as a full-time Co-Founder were some major milestones early on. Hitting 500 students was also a great one to reach.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Once we started growing our team, we spent a lot of time looking for the right people, both to hire internally and to partner with. We had always thought that you want to make decisions based entirely on experience and skill. We had to unlearn that quickly when we realized there was something even more important – our culture. The culture we wanted to foster here was one of inclusion and motivation, and excitement for what we’re doing. At Avocademy, we teach UX/UI design to people who may never have even heard of it before and help them get great jobs in the field in under a year. What does that mean? You can teach skills to someone but culture not so much. We learned that lesson and now ensure we work with people with similar motivation to match our culture.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.avocademy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/avocademy_
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Avocademy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/avocademy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCukzTGUNq9ZrdbqwWoXyArA
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@avocademy Contact us: [email protected]