Who are Le Wagon Tokyo students?

Some of the most common questions we get during casual talks or application interviews are regarding our bootcamp’s demographics: How diverse are our applicants’ backgrounds? Do we accept students from abroad? Am I too old to join the bootcamp? 

After exactly 3 years, 13 sessions (including part-time) and over 200 students going through Le Wagon in Tokyo, let’s finally answer that question: Who are Le Wagon Tokyo students?

That’s 40 countries! (and counting)

Every session, we welcome between 8 and 14 different nationalities, and our students literally come from all over the world. In fact, Tokyo is one of the most international Le Wagon city, and the only continent we’ve never welcomed anyone from is Antarctica

Surprisingly, Japan is not the most represented country:

- USA with 56 students (26%)

- Japan with 45 students (21%)

- France with 16 students (7.5%)

But even though Japanese students do not represent the majority, we do welcome more students already living in Japan than flying from abroad:

We’ll be honest with you, we’re not there yet. With slightly below 1 in 4 students at Le Wagon Tokyo being a woman, we’re a little bit behind Le Wagon’s global average.

But two facts give us hope for the years to come

- The “Women in Tech” ratio for Japan is notably low (around 13%), and we’re significantly above average.

- Second, we’ve been noticing an increase over the past year: our last 4 batches combined had over 30% women enrolled, and this number seems to be improving with each new intake.

The answer in one word: never.

Though it is simplifying the richness of backgrounds, experiences and post-bootcamp plans, we do welcome a few typical profiles:

- First, students in the 25–35 age range, who realize that it’s not too late to pursue a tech career after a few years in a sometimes unfulfilling position. For them, the bootcamp is a fast-track to achieving their goal, very often after having dabbled with code through online courses.

- More “senior” students aged 36 and above, for whom the goal is very often slightly different: they want to understand “how things work”, in order to leverage on those skills in their previous industry. Whether it is to become product manager or launch their own startup, they believe that having a good grasp of how to build web applications is a critical step.

With an average age of 29 years old, we are also noticing that a majority of our graduates already has some professional experience — What kind of professional experience, you might ask?

What do a sushi chef, a construction worker, a barista or a fashion designer have in common? As you may guess, they all joined a Le Wagon Tokyo batch. But more importantly, they all had the drive and motivation to make a life-changing decision to learn to code. 

When it comes to learning programming, we believe that your background doesn’t matter, and that the only make or break factor will be your hard work and dedication before, during and after the program.

Other common points we find amongst our applicants are the willingness to do something more meaningful professionally, or to come back to hands-on tasks like design or code. For them, programming is a very rewarding activity: every day, they build small applications, and get to see the result right away.

Whether they are startup founders, product managers or designers, our part-time bootcamp attracts a good mix of professionals in the tech and startup industry.

What are they looking for? Most of them are evolving in very engineering-oriented environments, and they sometimes feel that a lack of technical skills is holding them back. By joining our part-time session, they gain skills every week that they can directly apply in their daily jobs: interacting with a dev team, building prototypes, and sometimes even getting hands-on by writing lines of code.

With our part-time bootcamp running for 24 weeks and every single student being a Tokyo resident, opportunities to build up a strong network are numerous. It’s probably too soon to tell (our first part-time session is ending this March), but we’re looking forward to welcoming new Tokyo-based companies in the list of Le Wagon’s startup success stories!

Eventually, the variety of backgrounds, experiences and nationalities brings an exceptional richness to each Le Wagon Tokyo session. No matter what their personal stories are, we are always genuinely impressed by our students’ commitment and thirst to learn.

Add to the mix a dense program, a very open atmosphere and a supportive community, and our program becomes a unique environment to learn programming, change your life and have fun in the process!