Why We’re Launching Ironhack in Paris — a few tips for expansion
Couple of months ago, Alex and I barely knew anything about Ironhack. In fact, we didn’t know each other. Alex was just coming back from Africa, where he’d spent over 2 years at Jumia (Rocket Internet group) to reorganize and lead their operations. We ended up being in the same recruiting process for General Manager in France and eventually both got hired — Alex as Head of Expansion and myself as GM. Each of us really embraced the vision and ability to execute of the two cofounders, Gonzalo and Ariel. Over the last 3 months, we have been busy setting up everything for our rollout in France. I thought it was time to make it public and share our thoughts on France, its tech ecosystem and our plans within the Education market.
From « that sounds interesting » to « let’s do it »: how we decided to launch in France
It’s no mystery that over the last 5–7 years, the French tech ecosystem has experienced an impressive and constant growth. It has now become the 2nd one in Europe, after the UK (see below). Funding rounds of +€50M have multiplied — think about BlablaCar, Sigfox, OVH, Vestiaire Collective, Drivy, etc. — while French startups have shown a great ability to develop cutting-edge products to conquer European/international markets. One of most recent and epic examples of that is Payfit, a SaaS-based HR platform to help SMBs manage the pay and leave of their employees. Their team has created an industry-specific coding language for HR that is becoming a new standard. In other words, all signals are pointing to the same direction: France is back!
But when launching a new market, you cannot simply rely on what you read in TC, VentureBeat & co. You seriously need to do your homework and have a closer look at the market within which you’ll position yourself. To do so, we first established a list of criteria to evaluate the market opportunity and the market environment. Among those, the main ones were:
#Jobs: is there a strong demand for digital talents?
The whole model of Ironhack is to combine the best of a top-notch CS school and a tech recruiting agency: we tackle the shortage of digital talents by offering individuals immersive and hands-on courses around digital skills and helping them find their dream job. So one good indicator for us is the number of jobs opened in tech companies (startups and corporates). With that regards, let’s say that France is well positioned. As of May 1st, there are 7,717 positions opened on Indeed for « Web developer » in France vs 3,868 in Germany — the ratio is the other way around on AngelList (152 startups recruiting in FR vs 285 in GER)
#Talents: do tech companies find the people they need?
Then, we have a look at the matching between offer and demand on the tech labour market — kind of the Beveridge curve but for the 21st century. Based on the latest data from Syntec Numérique (a professional union of French tech and IT companies), the unemployment rate of web developers is below 3% — under the friction rate — and almost 10,000 jobs aren’t filled every year because of the talents’ shortage. In other words, too many jobs for too little qualified candidates. You better understand why “recruiting developers” is the n°1 priority for 68% of French startups.
Exactly what we want to solve ;)
#Education: what are the causes of the talents’ shortage?
Once we identified the market opportunity, we needed to better understand how we could position Ironhack in the education market. We see Ironhack as a whole new educative model — more on that in a next article — that comes over-the-top (OTT) as we distribute education and knowledge on top of traditional players, through different channels. In France, we add a ledger to engineering (Polytechnique, Mines, Centrale, etc.) and CS schools (Epita, Epitech, etc.) with 3-month intensive courses focused on specific skills — i.e. web development when it comes to coding.
France has long been famous for the quality of its scientific and engineering education. When I was in San Francisco, I was always amazed to see the proportion of French developers in large tech companies — Google, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb and so on. Same thing can be seen at a more macro level — ENS Ulm, Polytechnique and others are ranked in the Top50 CS schools in the world. So we knew from the beginning that our journey in France was going to be challenging ;)
But we quickly identified three loopholes in the French tech education system that we could fix:
- diversity of technologies: most CS schools teach a very wide range of technologies, which makes it difficult for students to really dive into one specific and for schools to stay up-to-date;
- low integration with companies: most of CS schools discuss with tech companies only for recruiting. They completely miss the opportunity to integrate their technologies, projects and teams within the curriculum — which might explain the success of players Udemy or Udacity;
- little community engagement: CS schools still believe in an education model where learning happens between 18 and 23. Because of the digital revolution this model is dead: digital breaks the linear consumption of content and knowledge. That’s why we view our students as members of the family, where we share our skills, contacts and knowledge.
#Students: may the force be with you!
All that was great, but now the real question was raised: who will be our students? Who are we going to target? Our selection process is quite thorough and objective — 1 personal interview, 1 logical/technical interview — which opens a large scope of potential candidates. We’ve identified 5 customer personas, that I share below:
For each customer persona we have a list of acquisition channels, partners and analytics. So far it’s hard to tell what the split between categories is, but we’ll share that once our #1st session has started ;)
#Success: NPS, NPS and NPS
Our ambition is to duplicate in Paris the success we’ve had in our other campuses — Madrid, Barcelona and Miami. Overall, students rate us 4.9/5 on the main rating platforms — see CourseReport, SwitchUp and Quora. To do that, we’ll be constantly tracking our student NPS (plus the teacher and team NPS — more on NPS in the Harvard Business Review). We’ve identified it as our main metric to measure success (on top of others such project completion rate, knowledge retention rate, etc.). This correlates with our vision, in which education must be more student-focused than knowledge-centered.
Conclusion & ambition: we want to build the new Stanford!
We firmly believe the traditional education and training model is now dead because of the digital revolution. It’s time to acknowledge that and start building a new model, digital-based and student-focused, combining the same academic excellence as Stanford with the same recruiting conversion as a Hired. It’s a big, passionate challenge but as the saying goes, « vision drives execution ».
Let’s get in touch! => francois@ironhack.com
Want to know more about Ironhack? More info here: www.ironhack.com
