Actual School offers various training paths, including traditional business schools and more innovative bootcamp formats. Among them is Holberton, which trains software developers using an innovative pedagogical approach, as the training is conducted without teachers, classes, or classrooms.
An institution founded by a group of friends, including Julien Cyr, in San Francisco about ten years ago to address the talent shortage in Silicon Valley companies regarding software development capabilities.
“A bottleneck had formed because training these talents took a long time, generally 5 years at a university or private schools, which were not necessarily accessible due to financial barriers or the perception of higher education for people from families that have never pursued studies, as well as time constraints. Not everyone has 5 years to train,” explains Julien Cyr.
Multiple obstacles have resulted in a shortage of trained individuals, first in the United States, then globally.
Thus, the group of friends set out to train software engineers with quality development skills and no entry barriers, professionals capable of quickly integrating into the corporate world.
To achieve this, Holberton School relies on software. “It’s not a deliberate choice to eliminate the teacher. Rather, it requires many teachers to train numerous students in a traditional environment, which is practically very difficult to achieve.”
So, the group of engineers developed a platform that provides students with guided projects. Each day, they receive tasks to complete, guided step by step. As time progresses, the complexity of these projects increases, and they also become more autonomous.
The solution is supported by artificial intelligence that provides real-time feedback to students on everything they produce, allowing them to progress at their own pace.
“But we are still in a school, meaning there is a physical campus where we welcome our students. They will work together in cohorts,” specifies Julien Cyr.
A training program that allows for rapid adaptation to a constantly evolving world. “AI is somewhat frightening because everything is changing. The way we learn is changing, people's expectations are changing, the job market is being disrupted. But ultimately, we are starting to understand that it’s not man versus artificial intelligence, but man with artificial intelligence against man alone. And that’s what we need to integrate,” explains Julien Cyr.
“We are indeed moving towards a world where we will have mixed teams of humans and machines, but we need to create coherence among all this, and this creativity, this architecture, this human intelligence, in the end, we will still need to exercise it,” concludes Julien Cyr.
