Bringing technical skills to employees during uncertain times, remotely.

One of the main goals we have set ourselves at Le Wagon is to make coding accessible to everyone in Germany. Times like a pandemic require us to rethink our ways of living and learning. In the light of this, we have launched a series of online workshops in order to make learning to code accessible to everyone. In Germany, we have also gone one step further by offering employees on Kurzarbeit the possibility to learn to code for free. 

 

Let’s be real - we can't escape it: digitalization is eating the whole economy. No company can afford not to equip their employees with the right skills.

 

With the time and space to reflect, we have a unique opportunity to take a step back from our everyday working lives and routines and think about where the world of work will be in five, ten, twenty years. We have the chance to learn something new that will prepare us for the most in-demand of jobs of now and the future: coding.

 

For employers, this is a great time to create a more efficient team. When each employee has a basic level of digital skills, teams can work smarter and faster. We can’t deny it - reskilling employees is necessary in order to build trust and loyalty with employees, who will appreciate the new skills.

 

And this is exactly what Honeypot recognised.

 

Honeypot and Le Wagon have been partnering for a number of months and have decided to take this partnership a little further! The synergies we both share are pretty clear: Honeypot is a reverse hiring platform for developers.
Over the last months, they have come to our campus in Berlin and taught our students the ins-and-outs on what it takes to land a job as a developer. This time, the roles have turned and we have taught their non-technical employees the basics of coding. Given the current situation, we ran the workshop completely remotely. Everyone was able to join this 2 hours workshop from the comfort of their own living room or kitchen in which they learned to create a landing page from scratch, using HTML and CSS.

 

Thank you so much for the eye-opening workshop. Coding had always been something I have always been curious about but had no idea how to go about it, nor the motivation. But the Le Wagon workshop was almost heaven-sent. Learning how to create a HTML actually seemed easier than I had ever imagined, it's the CSS that gave me a bit of challenge but hey, Rome wasn't built in one day, right? It was also very inspiring that the entire workshop was led by amazing and intelligent women. Something I am very excited to see as the ratio of male to female developers (to me) is not close to being balanced out yet. I hope to see and learn more! Thank you so much!

Mirko Leskur, Talent Success Manager @ Honeypot 

I used to study computer science at the secondary education level, which I've continued but never finished at university for personal reasons. I'm still in love with programming and engineering, and I felt like I wanted to refresh my memory.

I think the presenter was clear and prepared. The content was of appropriate level for new entrants. A lot was covered, but I didn't feel overwhelmed by the number of concepts that were introduced.

Lisa Gärtner, Expansion Manager Austria @Honeypot

I've known Le Wagon for quite a while through Honeypot and I also had the opportunity to participate in the Women's Coding Day at LeWagon last summer, where we spent an entire day becoming familiar with html, css and touching upon Javascript. I simply love the correlation between something is used for the content, then you make it pretty and with Javascript you make things dynamic and interactive. I mean, how cool is that?

I've only met nice and smart people at LeWagon (is that a requirement to work there? ;) and the layout of a shorter version of the 2h webinar did not disappoint. Personally I believe that it was enough time to get a sense of the relationship between html and css and how important clean code and smart shortcuts are ;) Still, I could have spent one more hour digesting the learnt things together with the group and our hosts - I loved the vibe of the workshop!