I never thought I would live through a period like the one we've spent these last few months. COVID, lockdown, anguish and anxiety…
When you start a company, as a founder, you owe it to yourself to consider the risks. But here, I have to admit, risks like a sudden pandemic - I hadn't factored those in.
I imagine I wasn't the only one in that situation.
Past the stage of stupefaction, you either act or bury your head in the sand, ostrich-style. In retrospect it sounds easy, but in early March, when not a single phone of any client or prospect was being picked up, it really wasn't.
I spent ten days in a state of shock, at home, thinking, doing nothing but letting my brain wander, conjecture, project, taking over the empty space of my living room filled with a calm yet anxious atmosphere.
And then, after that long period of reflection and many conversations with other professionals - notably with Arnaud Castelltort, whom I've known for ten years from working together when I was head of education at Epitech - it became obvious that our tech expertise with Flint had to fit into an effort of help for the "after-COVID", favouring the transmission of our know-how, and also into a post-economic-crisis effort tied to the impact of COVID and the complete shutdown.
Flint Academy was born from this early-March projection of the drama the COVID crisis would cause for employment, and especially for developer employment.
After many conversations with IT engineers over the past three years through my work, I had identified a category of IT professionals who work on ageing technologies (very often at the company's request - the famous "legacy"), and who do no tech watch on the side. That category would be the first to be hit by the slowdown and post-COVID redundancies.
They would then find themselves in great difficulty regaining competitiveness on a job market already saturated with strong profiles.
So throughout the lockdown period we worked in immersion mode to build a one-month curriculum, 100% remote, fully aligned with the demand of companies (our prospects, our clients - the ones we live with every day through our consulting business, whose needs we know well).
RebootJS
RebootJS is designed to "reboot" the careers of those developers, to hand them back the keys and tools they need to be more relevant in a job market that is going to tighten more and more.
Beyond a top-quality technical curriculum using all the standards and tools companies actually use, RebootJS supports learners on the soft-skill side, because they often no longer know how to sell themselves, build their personal branding, do effective tech watch, etc.
We intend to give them back all those tools and techniques, which will help them regain confidence, get past impostor syndrome and finally move forward again.
In September 2020 our first session will launch. But we wanted to mark our engagement and solidarity towards these people in difficulty even more strongly. So our first cohort will be free: all training costs will be covered by Flint.
It comes from our values of sharing and solidarity towards society.
This crisis forced us to refocus on our value add and, more importantly, on what we could bring that was different and useful in the world that comes after.
Flint becomes a tech "group" with the same humanist values that animate it, made of a consulting branch and a training branch - for more services to our clients.
RebootJS is accessible via Pôle Emploi funding and also to employees through the OPCO, since Flint Academy is Datadock-certified.
Follow our news: the link to pre-registration or to ask for information will arrive very shortly.