Code to AI: How Le Wagon is training product builders who can adapt to a moving tech landscape

In 2012, when I passed out of my engineering college, my first job gave me an immediate reality check – what I learned in college did not necessarily apply in the real world. More than a decade ago, it was not only true for engineering but also technical education. The gap in traditional education and the technical skills needed to build your own tech product or company was huge.

This gap was also observed by Boris Paillard, Romain Paillard, and Sébastien Saunier, and the trio launched Le Wagon as the missing block between traditional higher education and the tech job market. Boris Paillard says he was coming from an engineering school and had some coding knowledge but it wasn’t enough to build a software product.

“I had some academic courses in Python, but I didn’t know at all how to build a modern software product,” he says. For him, the solution was to build a wagon that sits between higher education and the tech companies and they called it Le Wagon.

A solution to the foundational challenge

Le Wagon was not only formed to bridge the gap between traditional education and the tech job market but also stems from a personal experience. After his engineering school, Paillard worked at a bank, where he felt the urge to switch jobs to either join a tech company or launch his own tech startup.

However, he was soon met with the reality that his limited coding skills weren’t enough for him to build a web application, integrate APIs or collaborate efficiently on GitHub with a tech team. He describes this as the disconnect between the education system and industry and adds that this disconnect has grown bigger with the acceleration of technology and the availability of coding, programming languages, frameworks and so on.

“So we wanted to equip people with the skills that they were missing to join a tech company in a technical role or an adjacent role like product manager, where you’d still need deep technical understanding on how to build software products,” Paillard tells me.

Unlike entrepreneurs in the edtech space who openly criticise the educational system, Paillard is empathetic towards it. He says the gap is driven by the fact that the school curriculum was made when the information was not easily accessible and the fixed curriculum didn’t need to change often.

He further adds that by design, schools couldn’t change their curriculum all the time, and they have lots of constraints that prevent them from being agile and adapting rapidly to technical changes. It’s a foundational challenge and Le Wagon sees bootcamp as the solution.

Product-first bootcamps

Coding bootcamps first emerged in 2011 and quickly gained popularity as they promised well-paid jobs without the need for a college degree. While they have exploded in the last few years, higher education institutions have also warmed up to the idea of partnering with bootcamps like Le Wagon.

“Many higher education institutions are partnering with Le Wagon to include bootcamps into their curriculum because they know they cannot do that themselves,” explains Paillard.

However, bootcamps are not that different and most bootcamps promise to deliver the same result. Paillard argues that Le Wagon is different because it is obsessed with how to build products and good software from the start. For example, at Le Wagon, building software like a web application means using a real domain name, paying attention to an intuitive user interface and using the best collaboration practices on GitHub.

While this may sound like table stakes for bootcamps, Paillard says not all bootcamps follow best practices and those focused on the technical side fail to pay attention to the product [development]. This product focus comes from the fact that Le Wagon was training a lot of developers and people who wanted to be entrepreneurs and product managers.

Since Le Wagon has bootcamps in 20 countries, 40 cities, and an alumni network of more than 100 nationalities, Paillard tells me another differentiator is their community. “So right now there are more than 28,000 alumni, among them 3,000 teachers that teach in our different campuses. That creates a lot of opportunities,” he quips.

Online-offline

Another aspect of Le Wagon’s bootcamps that has become a differentiator is its offline presence. A lot of bootcamps went online during the pandemic and have stayed online but Le Wagon still offers bootcamps from physical locations within reach of many students. For students who cannot visit its offline bootcamps, they can choose to learn online.

For instance, local players in Italy have gone online while the same is happening in France. “We have very strong student satisfaction for the online bootcamps,” says Paillard, before adding, “For people who want in-person experience, we believe that’s a great way to learn too.”

This online-offline presence in Europe forms the north star of Le Wagon’s success story. With several campuses in big cities like Paris, Marseille, Lille, and Lyon in France, and campuses in London and Berlin, they can serve student entrepreneurs in France, the UK, and Germany. They also have campuses in Spain, Portugal, Amsterdam, and Brussels to expand their European reach.

With additional campuses in Asia, Latin America, and Canada, Paillard says they have a healthy offering where online plays a big part in their growth. Depending on the market, he says 30 to 40 per cent of the students learn online but the metric he is most proud of is satisfaction.

“We believe hybrid, combining in-person and online, is the future of education because we cannot replace human interactions,” he says.

Quality and community

A decade later, Paillard says their biggest learning has been to focus on the quality of education rather than innovating at the fastest pace possible. The key to success, he says, is to focus on quality and community. He further adds that the difficulty for a startup like Le Wagon is to keep this focus on quality while the tech job market is changing and demands the launch of new programs.

“When you start to go from software development to AI product development to data science to data analytics to data engineering to growth marketing to other topics as we did, it’s way more difficult to keep the focus on the student experience because you have to maintain way more curriculums,” he elaborates.

This quality focus has led to Le Wagon having touched more than 200,000 students and it has over 28,000 bootcamp graduates in the last ten years. These students have gone to found 221 tech startups, raised $1.1B and 10 were selected for Y Combinator. Sao Paulo-based Qi Tech founded by Le Wagon alumni Marcelo Bentivoglio has raised €232M while Belgian financial services startup Keyrock by alumni Kevin De Patoul has raised €78M.

Le Wagon’s claim is to help students and entrepreneurs launch their ideas into the real world and these startups founded by alumni are a great example of that success. Paillard adds that the software development program launched 10 years ago remains the flagship but they have launched AI programs to help students build user interfaces and features needed by AI companies raising billions of dollars right now.

“AI is changing so fast that if you launch a program today, it may become obsolete in two months and the value for the students won’t be good,” he cautions.

Instead of focusing on AI programs, Le Wagon is offering bootcamps that help students use AI in fields like growth marketing, data analytics, automation, etc. With a staff of around 200, Le Wagon is delivering a balance between quality education, systemic online learning with an option for offline learning, and creating product managers that change the world.

It is a tall order and Paillard knows this well. To keep their unaverted focus on product development, Paillard switched to an executive chairman role recently as a way to deliver unrivalled products and focus on delivering quality education in a changing tech landscape.

Launch your tech career in the Netherlands or Belgium with Le Wagon’s immersive bootcamps.