Hyperion Dev — Careers in IT and Online Learning

It is yet another edition of What's Involved and joining me on the line, did I see correctly from the UK as well? These days I never know where people are that I'm talking to. From the UK, I believe, Shamil and Singh. How are you? Hi David. Yeah, maybe this is easier for us. I'm currently based in Cape Town but our company is also based in the UK. Oh okay, you see I never know because last week I was talking to people from the UK and all over the place, the joys of modern technology. Okay, so we're going to go with Shim, it'll certainly make it easier for all concerned. You work for a company with a company called Hyperia Dev and you are responsible there, you're the head of admissions, collections and placements. So before we get into all of that, because it sounds fascinating, tell me a little bit about Shim. I mean, tell me a little bit about your background and how did you get to where you currently are. Yeah, that's a bit of an interesting one. So I started off in the hospitality industry, obviously completed my degree and then I moved over to corporate, started getting myself involved in capital machinery but I made my way into the tech world starting with Groupon, so yeah, I used to run the national teams here at Groupon.

Then I moved to Yoko, so they're in FinTech, a very popular company that has point of sale and speed points and then I found my way into EdTech, which is currently where I am at Hyperia Dev. Okay, all right, and Hyperia Dev, just the reason I want you to tell me a little bit about Hyperia Dev is I want to set the scene because one of the things and one of the reasons I wanted to chat to you guys is along came COVID-19 and it just turned the entire world upside down and on its head, people are having to re-skill, people are having to up-skill, you guys do a lot of this online stuff, what exactly does Hyperia do? Awesome, so yeah, we've been around for the last five years now and it started off as a university initiative to mentor the lowest performing computer science graduates with the highest performing computer science graduates, eventually that got a bit of traction, the university got interested in it, we then decided to incorporate, we won the Facebook Africa Innovation Challenge, we were sponsored by Google, so there were a couple of successes along the way and through that we've developed programs that allow people who aren't necessarily coders or developers to join the world of tech and become developers through studying with us, so essentially we're an online education platform, last year we recently launched our on-site campuses because we just saw a huge amount of people wanting to actually come to a class, spend its learning with peers and have a live lecturer, so as you mentioned COVID did put a spanner in the works there, but first and foremost we are an online education company that teaches people to code, we've been operating as I said for the last five years and we have students from all over the world, we've trained around about 2,000 or supported rather 2,000 students from about 42 countries.

That is absolutely fantastic, I'm just having a look at your website here and wondering if this is something that would shoot me because our business has had to do, what is the buzzword at the moment? Pivot, we've had to pivot, in fact we've done so much pivoting I'm quite dizzy at the moment but from us also doing a lot of in-person training etc etc to now trying to get stuff online and I know we're not the only ones and we're a small business, but for me sort of at the tender, sprightly age of 52 to try and learn not even coding because I think coding would just blow my mind, but little things like WordPress and how to do that and how to make sure that people don't hack your website and leave pornographic links and all sorts of things, it's a massive struggle, do you cater for people like me or is it better to do this when you're younger? That's a double-edged question, let's address the first one, definitely cater to individuals like you, in fact for the majority of our lifespan we specifically focused on individuals who were working part-time, who had jobs, who wanted to specifically pivot as you mentioned into their career in tech, so taking existing individuals experience, coupling that with the tech skills that we enable them with, it sort of boosts their career into tech and sort of aligns their previous experience to what they possibly could do going into the working world.

That being said, we have launched our on-site campus and that definitely brought about interest from a lot of the younger demographics, so students, matriculants, who are more used to a conventional classroom environment. To answer the second part of your question, is it better to start when you're younger? Absolutely, I mean in 2020, 2021 I think it is, we're going to be introducing coding robotics at a very fundamental basic education level in South Africa, it's actually a growing movement around the world to try and get young ones involved in the coding movement as soon as possible. I think that's absolutely brilliant, I had the pleasure a little while ago of chatting to the head of the Vits Rail Lab, old Benji Rosman, and they do a lot of robotics and stuff, and I've got to be honest, I mean halfway through it he'd left me behind, way behind, and he'd try to dumb it down so that simple people like me would understand it, but it definitely is the way that we seem to be going. The question is though, now we don't know, in terms of this whole COVID thing, when schools are going to be reopened, when we're going to be able to kind of get back to some semblance of normality, I mean we don't even know what the new normal is going to be yet.

I would guess that jobs in the tech industry and developing and coding are going to be massive going forward. Yeah, absolutely, I think just from a practical point of view, you yourself not being able to go into the office and employing the use of remote working tools just increases the need for businesses to use more tech in terms of getting their business operations up and running as much as it can in the new normal working environment, so with that increase of usage, would come the skill sets to manage, maintain, develop those tools, so yeah. Fantastic stuff. We're going to be back in just a little bit. That is what's involved my special guest from Hyperion Dev, we are talking to Shim Sing. I like Shim, it sounds very cool. Based in Cape Town, so avoiding the dry heartfelt at the moment, we'll be back in just a bit. And we're back in my special guest Shim Sing from Hyperion Dev, head of admissions collections and placements. So now, Shim, if somebody's listening to the show now and they're going, okay, all right, where do I start? What do I do either for myself? Because I'm guessing, I'm guessing that a lot of people at this time, number one, are going to be made to continue to work from home, people are going to be made redundant and the jobs that we all used to know, I would think maybe are not going to be there anymore.

So where do we start? Okay, well, yeah, I think it's first, firstly important to understand that saying things like the job that you have is not going to be available, definitely things are going to change. So in all industries, things are going to be changing in the way that we work. So it's important to try and understand how it's going to change. With regards to Hyperion Dev, we have a couple of different courses. So we have web development, software engineering, data science, and we've just recently launched a very intensive boot camp, which encompasses a whole range of front end and back end languages. So depending on where you are, let's say, for example, you're a photographer, ideally, you'd probably want to also go into the web development side of things. It's more design focused and it's basically the front side of what you see in a website, but also understanding how the back end works. Because maybe, let's say, for example, you are a lawyer. One of the industries that are definitely set to change because of the digital transformation that we're going through, maybe the software engineering boot camp would be something that would be more aligned to your skill set and how you can move forward.

So it's very dependent on the individual, dependent on your learning styles, depending on the time that you have available to learn and your current sort of disposition. Yeah, and that's what our admissions team does in the sense of helping you navigate through the options of courses that we have that suit, number one, your career, your goals, and also number two, the amount of time that you have available. Okay. As you're talking, I'm going through your website, which is a very, very nice website, I have to say, and I'm just having a look at what you're doing and the website developer. There's a few things in here I recognize. I don't know how to do any of them, but I recognize HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and those kind of things. If somebody's going and they're sitting here now, and I'm talking specifically now, I'm thinking of maybe youngsters who are not so sure how the metric is going to go, where it's going to go. Is this something that they could check to you guys about? Yeah, definitely. So there's a lot of information on our website, as you mentioned, and for individuals, I think number one is, am I going to get job fulfillment? Then we're looking at salary and job prospects. For example, we have a grad report that you could download and it gives you an idea of how individuals, after completing our bootcamp, how they fared in the working world.

Some really interesting stats, for example, generally people would get a job three to six months after completing our bootcamp. On average, they would end up doubling their salary. So these are stats for people who are very job focused and employment minded. Alternatively, if you look at our student snapshot, we have demographics and insights into our current student base. So you can sort of align yourself and see if this is something that would suit you purely because you can understand the type of people that are joining our courses. And once again, if you are more so career focused, you can easily download our bootcamp syllabus. So you'll be able to see the skill sets, the outcomes, the frameworks, and the languages you'll be able to learn through that bootcamp to see if that aligns to once again your goals and aspirations. But again, it's a lot of information, so one of the teams that I work with, the admissions team is there to disseminate that to you, break it down to you, have a very consultative session and then guide you through that. In addition, once again, we're in the digital space now, we want to try and automate everything. We also have trials and applications that you can go through, they're all free.

So you can go onto our website, apply for the trial, see exactly how our learning and mentorship would work, get a feel for coding and then be able to make a decision from there. Fantastic. And I've got to tell you, the more that I'm looking at this and going through what you guys do, it really, really seems fantastic. Just talk about now, we got COVID, everybody's bored with COVID now. I saw the other day, lockdown must fall or something, I don't know. It's all of these things that are happening at the moment. But you guys, because your boot camps, a lot of times, they're on site, either in Joburg or in Cape Town. Obviously now, are they still going ahead, those boot camps? So yeah, so a portion of our boot camps are roughly about 30% where we did have our students on campus. We currently hosting lessons online. So a lot of the boot camps, especially universities as well, they're all focusing on maybe some people are using Zoom or other calling systems, but they're conducting their lessons and lectures online at the moment. So they're still continuing and our students are still progressing. Fantastic stuff. And we are having a chat from Hyperion Dev to Shum Singh. He is the head of admissions, collections and placements at Hyperion Dev.

When we come back, I want to talk a little bit about the whole concept of placements though, because this sounds fascinating to me. So when we come back, we'll talk more about that. Right, we're back. It is what's involved and my special guest Shum Singh from Hyperion Dev placement. So now placements, I understand that in the old fashioned way of somebody's going to find me a job. Is that the kind of thing you do for students? Yeah, that's the goal. So let me give you an example. Last year, November, in that Black Friday rush, what we did is we actually guaranteed jobs to certain students who graduated on time. So if you are a student and you joined with us during that promotional period, we would have guaranteed you a job or we would just completely give you your tuition fees back. So we started the placements team to be able to connect individuals who completed our bootcamp and also companies looking for developers. However, what's been interesting and I think it's really worth noting is that we've actually taken the move to a careers platform where we're able to build a platform as a business and connect automatically businesses and candidates, even candidates who don't necessarily study with Hyperion Dev so that we can create in essence a marketplace where we can bring developers and companies closer together a lot more easier and a lot more efficiently.

I think that's fantastic. I mean, just to have a look again, some of the people, if we can drop some names, that you've actually secured positions for some of your students at places like Nikon, Nedbank, IBM, Vitality, Amazon, those are just a few of them. So we're not talking tiny companies here, we're talking fairly large companies. You guys, I see you mentioned Google, Facebook supports you as well, don't they? Yeah, we currently were as part of the London Labs incubator recently and as I mentioned, I think into 2012, we won the Africa Facebook innovation challenge. Wow, okay. And just also, sorry David, just worth noting. We actually like to place our graduates at savvy tech startups. So one of our recent placements that we're pretty proud of is at SweepSouth. And those are the kind of roles that our developers like and companies are looking for developers in. Listen, ironically, I mean, or coincidentally rather, I've made use of SweepSouth again in another lifetime, but we did and they were brilliant. The service, the platform, the way everything works, I was blown away and I was thinking, geez, that's a great little company, but not such a little company. I don't know how they're doing now.

But this is what it's all about though, it's looking at these challenges and getting ourselves to think of things in a different way. In terms of you guys at Hyperion Dev, where are you planning to go? What's next for you guys? Because I mean, you seem to have done a whole lot. And I'm just wondering, where are you next? Well, we have just recently launched our newest bootcamp. So it's an intensive and certified software engineering and web bootcamp. So what we aim to do is we aim to teach students over a course of six months, full time, with the aim of them completing and then we also guarantee a three month internship. So our mission is purely just to close the tech skills gap. And I think being able to give individuals a comprehensive bootcamp experience that takes them through multiple languages and also guarantee them the three month internship will definitely contribute to number one, our employment rate, and number two, any sort of digital transformation issues that companies may have. So that's an online and on site hybrid experience for Hyperion Dev that we're launching. Because we, as I said, going into this era of the new normal, we see that people learn better with occasional face to face check ins and lectures, but generally prefer to study at the pace that suits them maybe in the comfort of their own home.

We also are aiming to get this course certified with the MSCTC and accredited so that we can start playing in the in the space of the more formalized space. Let's put it that way. Yeah, that's going to be that's what's going to be a process. We've had some some some dealings with those guys as well. And I wish you all the best. In terms of of when when to start, I mean, if you know, I think that's the biggest problem that we have in this country is that they aren't any avenues to get into this tech side of things fairly earlier on in your in your school career, really, I mean, we're not really focusing on that. Is that something that you guys are going to take into account? You know, let's say if somebody's in and I'll show my age now, if they're in grade 10, I was going to say standard eight, that does work out to grade 10, doesn't it? If they were in grade 10, or grade nine, or whatever the case may be, is this something that they could look at starting, you know, in conjunction with their school time? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, as far as I recall, the youngest student that we've had on our platform was about 12. So it's definitely an option for for parents to consider for their for their for their kids.

I do think a lot of the children, especially in high schools, are the ones that are driving being able to take on new responsibilities. So it's always possible. However, I would recommend rather that it would be more of an option for a matriculant. When you look at the return on investment, when comparing choosing a boot camp, and then going for a computer science degree, and you look at the amounts that you will pay intuition at universities over the course of four years, and then the outcomes and job prospects at the end of that four years. When comparing the outcomes of our grad report, for example, and looking at when graduate finishes in six months, and then look at a three year work experience, the earning potential of one which is our boot camp is pretty pretty, it's pretty obvious that it's a bit higher. So this is a choice that individuals should make. But once again, it's a very personal one. Now, before I let you go, in terms of pricing and, you know, payment schedules, etc, etc, what have you guys got going there? Because I know, you know, there's a lot of people, I believe that that may have the talent and the the ability to do this kind of work, but not necessarily have the funds to pay a huge amount up front.

And I must say, looking at your rates very briefly, you guys don't seem overly expensive at all. Thanks, man. Just to put it in context, if you look at some of the boot camps that we compete with, especially on the international basis, Flat Iron School, for example, Lambda, their fees are within the thousands of dollars range without giving too much away. And if you look at that, compared to ours, we're significantly lower. But to answer your question around the economic gap from people who want to study versus people who can't afford to study, we do offer scholarships. So that is always an option. And we've tried our best to always address the inequality. So for example, one of the initiatives that we ran early last year is our CCP program, we actually trained 66 students for free in certain principles of web development, software engineering, and also pedagogical concepts in order to train other people and review other people's code who are interested in learning how to code. That's absolutely fantastic. It fascinates me. And you know, the more I in my very limited way getting to this, the more I think, man, if only I had the aptitude and the dedication when I was a lot younger, I could have I could have been styling today.

But you know, things are as they are and radio called and you know, my parents just like well, my mom is still wondering when I'm going to get a real job, but if you're thinking about this, the best thing to do is check it out online, you guys are very, very organized online, you've got all the info there, there's a chat function. So go to HyperionDev, it's spelled H-Y-P-E-R-I-O-N-D-E-V, HyperionDev.com, you guys will be more than happy to have a chat with you there and check it out. And you know, if you're a parent listening to the show and you're wondering about your children and what's going to happen and matric, etc., etc., this could be a very good way to go because I think this is definitely going to be one of the fields that's going to do nothing but grow in the future. And on that note, Shim, I think it's time we can say thanks and I really appreciate you guys taking the time out and we wish you all the best for the future. I think you guys are doing a fantastic job. Once again, if you want to find out any information about that, it's HyperionDev.com. Shim, thanks so much for the time, mate, I really do appreciate it. Thank you, man, and I really appreciate you having us on, I really had a good time chatting to you.

Awesome. Well said, Shim, thanks. Bye-bye. Cheers, man. Bye-bye.