Last Friday, December 3rd, we attended the demo day of Le Wagon’s first batch in Casablanca and 717th globally. For those of you who’ve never heard of Le Wagon, it is a coding school teaching Web Development and Data Science through immersive bootcamps. Launched in 2013 by Boris Paillard, Romain Paillard, and Sébastien Saunier, they are now running bootcamps in 44 different cities in 25 countries all across the world, out of the many campuses they have, 2 are based in Africa (Casablanca and Mauritius). Their alumni gave birth to 182 startups, 88 of them raised a total amount of 461 million dollars.
The demo day started with Zineb Fakihani giving a great welcome speech, where she welcomed the guests and talked quickly about Le Wagon in addition to this first batch in Casablanca and before handing over the microphone to the students (Now Graduates) so that they can present their projects.
Laura Martin is here with us to talk about this batch, the demo day, and the upcoming batch. Laura is a Senior Business Analyst at Honoris united universities, and one of Le Wagon’s program managers.
First batch:
In Casablanca, we welcomed our first batch under the Honoris brand in September 2021. 8 students from all walks of life; including a flight Cabin Crew, a marketer, a freshly graduated student, successfully became junior full stack web developers in just 9 weeks.
Loubna, one of our amazing students, decided to change her career with Le Wagon Casablanca. At 42 and after a 22-year career with Royal Air Maroc, Loubna embarked on a career switch. To quickly start a new professional life in the midst of Covid19, she selected the intensive 9-week Full Time format. “After having closed the chapter of Royal Air Maroc, I took a moment to think about choosing a path of reconversion. I wanted a short course, access to practice and something that will allow me to find a job quickly. In just 7 weeks at Le Wagon, I was able to develop my technical skills and forge incredible synergies with the group. A very enriching experience for me! “
Yassine, another student at Le Wagon Casablanca joined the community with the ambition of launching his own project after more than 5 years in the world of tourism and events. “I needed intense and condensed training and love the idea of becoming a Full stack Developer in just 9 weeks. It’s record time and challenging and that’s exactly what I needed. Working as a team played its magic, not only are we complementary but the links developed between us made the experience exceptional. “
Demoday:
Last Friday, we hosted our first Demo Day in Casablanca showcasing the incredible work of our students for our community. The Demo day is a demo of our students’ prototypes, a celebration of their achievements, and the beginning of their tech journey. New jobs, new startups, new opportunities, and new mindsets are created. Over 9 weeks, the students of batch #717 have learned to code from scratch and built two amazing web applications; Politbaro and Lensens.
Politbaro seeks to respond to the absence of accurate data and information available to Moroccan citizens prior to casting their vote in elections. The students built a platform referencing political players in the country, along with their social media, resume, etc. and news feeds aggregating articles from all media.
Lenses wants to solve the pain of clients and photographers by facilitating contact between the two. Lenses is a digital platform that connects photographers / videographers with private customers and companies.
70+ participants attended our First Demo Day including investors, corporates, tech enthusiasts, and students, to celebrate the success of our first batch. This was a chance for entrepreneurs to meet potential co-founders, for corporates to meet new talent skilled in Web Development and for tech enthusiasts to exchange ideas.
The upcoming batch:
We are extremely proud of our first graduating class in Casablanca and are eager to welcome the rest of our students in January for our full and part-time Web development batches as well as for the launch of our second course, Data Science (Web Development Full-Time: Jan 24, 2022, Web Development Part-Time: Feb 12, 2022, Data Science Part-time: Jan 22, 2022). Registrations are ongoing for both bootcamps at https://www.lewagon.com/casablanca. In the meantime, we are building our community and organizing free weekly coding workshops and professional tech talks which you can find on our social media pages. The next tech talk will take place on December 10th 2021, where we will welcome Ismael Belkhayat, successful serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Chari.ma.
Conclusion:
To conclude, we hope that these two projects will turn into real-life startups, and that Le Wagon will give birth to successful African startups similarly to what it did in Europe for the past decade.