Mentorship and Skill Advantage

One of the first things Daniel shared about his Le Wagon experience was the leadership of Le Wagon founder, Dirk. “Dirk does such a good job of taking care of you and puts you in a position to learn as much as you can and pushes you to have more ambitious goals.” For example, during Daniel’s job search after the bootcamp Dirk encouraged him to take on bigger projects to boost his coding portfolio. “He was a good source of information, continued to interact with me and even kept track of my progress once the Bootcamp was over.” As a founder, Dirk is thoroughly invested in each and every student’s success during and after the program and as a campus, we aim to provide our alumni with as many job opportunities as possible. Even after Daniel was offered a job, he was available to discuss salary ranges and job scope. 

It’s been six months since Daniel started his job as a backend engineer at tech startup Fave in Malaysia. It’s a popular app for discounts and promotions and also for making digital payments. He works with three senior engineers who are always willing to help him learn more. “It’s a very nice place to work, whether you’re experienced or just getting started,” he said, “they let you decide how much you want to take on so you can do it at your own pace.” Daniel’s company is Ruby on Rails-based, “I wasn’t specifically looking for a company coding in Ruby but it’s the perfect match, as it is the language I had the most experience with and Le Wagon graduates are very lucky that there are a lot of companies out there that use it.”

In a more general sense, Daniel also feels that the Bootcamp provides real-world experience, teaching you how to work as part of a team of developers and workflow by using GitHub, which is what most companies use to run their projects. At Le Wagon you learn to be a contributor because the work is divided into manageable tasks for each member while everyone maintains an overall understanding of the goal. “Le Wagon pushes you to do a big project - it’s how the program is organized,” he said. We pride ourselves on being great at teaching the fundamentals and how web applications work. 

“You are exposed to everything you need to know and it’s up to you to learn the rest,” Daniel said, “now that I’m working as a developer, I can attest that they teach you what you need to know in the industry.”

Since Daniel wanted to stay and continue to travel around Asia after the Bootcamp, his search for a job was narrow and it was not an easy journey. “If I was going to take any job anywhere I would probably have found a job much more easily,’ he said, “and there were times where I wasn't sure I’d be able to get the job I wanted because of my lack of experience.” However, he took time off and put in full-time hours to do more learning, kept working on projects and challenged himself “to understand things better from what I learnt in the Bootcamp.” (For another example of alumni adding more skills to their repertoire to land a job, read this) It’s definitely a difficult decision to make when you set yourself on a new career path, but “if you really believe it’s something you like, it is totally doable,” he said, “every bit that you learn will lead you to your goal and Le Wagon really helps you get there.” Another reason why our alumni tend to gravitate to startups is that they are often more than not innovative and creative. As a developer you’ll have more chances to “create something from scratch as well as maintain an existing product,” he said, something he was definitely not able to do at his previous job. Now, he sees himself in this industry for the foreseeable future and it’s “a career movie I’m happy with. The plan is to continue working in the same space gaining more experience and continuing to grow as a developer,” he said. 

Before the Bootcamp, Daniel was working as a mechanical engineer for the Washington DC metro system in 2018 and he hoped to start a career as a web developer. “I liked the idea of coding but didn’t know that much about it. I saw the growing industry and the increasing number of job vacancies,” he said. According to Daniel, mechanical engineering is a narrow field, “once you go into one track, it’s hard to move into other fields and it’s not that exciting.” He also didn’t like that it gave him little to no travel opportunities and that it wasn’t creatively rewarding. Most, if not all of our students who come to us wanting to learn how to code have little to no coding experience. Although his background is in engineering, it was far from anything to do with programming. His problem-solving skills might have helped a little, but there is absolutely no overlap in hard skills. 

Going into the Bootcamp, “I might as well have been a pharmacist,” Daniel said.  

Our students are often global citizens and our batches consist of at least 10 different nationalities. Daniel, who is Colombian American wanted to do a Bootcamp abroad. “I was already living in Dubai at the time and I didn’t feel like going back to the U.S. anyway,” he said. He liked the fact that he had the luxury of choice between any of our 38 campuses worldwide, “it gave me assurance of the program’s quality and it gave me the freedom to choose where to do it from,” he said. Daniel also went on SwitchUp when he was researching and it was ranked number one. 9 weeks later with a fresh set of new skills, he was not disappointed. “I had a great Bootcamp experience,” he said, “I really feel like I made the right choice with Le Wagon and going to Bali.” Not only are the instructors knowledgeable, but the classes are also easy to follow and are structured. Overall, “it’s a great place to learn how to code,” Daniel said.