Denis Brovarnyy was not satisfied with the educational formats available to aspiring programmers, so he decided to set up a school himself. Now a decade on, he runs three schools across three continents and can feel somewhat satisfied with his foray into entrepreneurship.
His cross-border education company, AIT Technology School, now has locations in Miami, Berlin, and Rehovot, Israel, where he set up the first school after suffering a professional setback as an engineer.
Laid off from a multinational company, Brovarnyy decided that he could always be a middleman, working behind the scenes, or he could return to working for someone else, or he could build something of his own and never look back.
Brovarnyy chose the second option.
“What drives me most is the belief that education should have practical consequences in a person’s life,” he says. “In fast-changing fields, knowledge alone is no longer enough.”
At AIT Technology School, in the US, in Germany, and in Israel, students can choose from 12 modules that range from Java and Python programming to software testing and quality assurance to designing optimal user interfaces. Brovarnyy is involved in every aspect of the school’s operations, from putting together curricula to liaising with teachers to sales and marketing efforts. His work has been a success. AIT Technology School has, since its inception, trained more than 1,500 professionals. At one time, it had 700 students enrolled across its locations. It also achieved his goal of offering something new.
“I’m proud of having helped to reshape the more traditional scool model into one that is more closely tied to market demand, real projects, and job readiness,” he says.
Doing so was never easy, especially since Brovarnyy, educated in the computer sciences, didn’t have any experience in education or entrepreneurship when he started AIT Technology School. He held a master’s in his field and had built up a resume as an engineering manager. Getting AIT off the ground did not involve completely abandoning his trajectory, though. Instead, he put his skills to new use.
“I think like an engineer,” he remarks. That means that he is practical, oriented toward solutions, and less bogged down in the more abstract aspects of academia. “I’ve always been less interested in credentials for their own sake,” says Brovarnyy. Instead, he wants to help his students get to where they need to be, to enter a new profession, to adapt to a market, to launch a new tool. This is particularly important in the AI era, as education is not just about knowledge, but about speed of application.
By building market-driven learning models, Brovarnyy and his students can respond to real employer demand, rather than static assumptions. That involves AI too, as AI is changing not just the skillset that students are expected to have, but also how they might get hired later on.
Accomplishing it all hasn’t been easy. He did acquire some entrepreneurship skills at Technion in Israel, where he completed some courses in 2017. He also studied business and entrepreneurship development at the York Entrepreneurship Development Institute and completed a leadership program at Stanford University.
But he’s also had to learn on the fly across cultures and languages. “It’s been a major challenge, taking a model that works in one market and adapting it across countries,” he says. These have different hiring cultures, student needs, and labor realities. But he credits the experiences with making him more resilient and pragmatic. This combination of technical education and international business exposure shaped his overall approach to creating education ventures.
He’s just getting started. With AI here to stay, he wants to build a more practical education model, one more connected to real work, teams, and market demand. “I want to continue expanding systems that help people not only learn technical skills, but also gain professional mobility, enter global labor markets, and eventually move from practitioners to builders and founders,” says Brovarnyy. “I’m especially interested in creating infrastructure that connects education, career development, and venture creation,” he says, “in a way that is more adaptive than traditional institutions.”
