Hello, I'm Ruben, I’m 38 years old and come from Portugal. I attended Le Wagon’s bootcamp in 2018 after spending some years as Team Leader and Project Manager roles, but felt it was time to change ;)
Coming from a job as a Project Manager, what pushed you to learn to code and change your career?
The perks had a lot to do with it. A developer role is well paid, there’s high employability and it’s common to work remotely. But just as important was the idea to gain the skills to build something on your own and materialize your ideas and creativity.
Tell us more about your bootcamp experience?
The bootcamp is intense, you really learn a lot during those 9 weeks. I was not top of my class at all, and traveling back and forth to Brussels, with two very young kids at home, didn’t help. But you bond with your colleagues, who have similar circumstances and benefit from several teachers with different experiences. And as you feel that you progress, it keeps you motivated to become a web developer. The bootcamp really helps you to have a better view of what it is to be a developer and to create connections that will help you in the future. Plus, it’s fun!
What happened after Le Wagon?
For me, it was quite difficult to set foot in the door. For many companies, having a junior developer means extra work, as they need to spend dev time tutoring. A couple of months after the bootcamp, I landed a traineeship as a Frontend Developer in a job fair co-organized by Le Wagon. The role was not necessarily about using the main skills you learn during the bootcamp, but with the background I received, I started getting more and more comfortable coding frontend. After the traineeship ended, I couldn’t find a job right away, but I spent my next days learning, revisiting the lessons from Le Wagon, building new stuff, and that portfolio really helps you to find your first job. From then on it’s fairly easy to grow, in logic that experience and knowledge = more opportunities and… dough.
What are you doing now?
I’m working as a Consultant for Volvo Financial Services, creating a web portal where the employees can consume different types of data.
A word of advice for anyone wondering if applying to Le Wagon is the right move?
It gives you a huge knowledge background and guides you in the best way to be a proficient developer by the end of the course. You won’t know everything after it, but nor does a Senior developer, but will teach you how to search information and have a very solid concept of web development and coding in general. The rest is up to you ;)
