Transmitting knowledge and sharing have always been important values for me. Whether it's participating in professional events, working in a team or coworking space, giving conferences, organizing a meetup, providing private lessons, or facilitating practical workshops — the excitement of sharing seems essential to me for moving forward and making progress.
First part.
Mentorship at Code Academy
Meeting
May 2017. Based in Rennes, I had been working for Yousign for a year while also freelancing on small projects. I spent most of my time at La Cordée coworking space. This is how I was put in contact with Fabrice Pluriel, who was then a project manager for Code Académie at FACE Ille-et-Vilaine — a web training program facilitating career change and professional integration.
Fabrice was looking for mentors to support students in the second cohort of Code Academy. The idea was to pair each student with a mentor to assist them throughout their year of learning. An evening meet-up was organized for volunteer mentors and students to get acquainted. Between icebreaker games and conversations over a buffet, I immediately hit it off with one of the students. The pairing happened naturally, and that's how I began mentoring Benjamin.
Support
Throughout the year, I shared my experience as a designer and front-end developer with Benjamin to support him as best as possible according to his needs. We organized regular sessions for exchanges and work. Benjamin would present his projects to me and explain his difficulties. I also shared my work and organizational methods with him. We also communicated frequently via messages to address his specific questions.
I tried to convey to him the importance of networking and the taste for participating in professional events. We therefore attended several meetups in Rennes, and I invited him and his cohort to the various events I organized around CSS.
Benjamin was motivated and dedicated. It was therefore only natural that I offered him to do his internship at Yousign with me.
Second part.
Internship at Yousign
Web integrator intern
The idea of offering Benjamin an internship with me developed over the course of our mentoring sessions. I was starting to need reinforcement for the integration and front-end development of the marketing website at Yousign. We therefore offered him a six-month internship, from February to July 2018.
As Yousign was based in Caen, we were working entirely remotely from Rennes. I therefore suggested that Benjamin join La Cordée, the coworking space where I regularly worked. We alternated our time between this space and working from home. He adapted without difficulty to this flexible rhythm and to remote exchanges via videoconference.
He quickly mastered the WordPress project we had been managing for over six months — a fully customized website with a bespoke theme and back-office. I dedicated the necessary time to answer his questions and help him progress on the project. I also encouraged him to devote time to his personal projects, particularly the development of his portfolio website.
→ View the Yousign website case study.As the internship progressed, Benjamin demonstrated great autonomy and maturity. I was thus able to entrust him with more responsibilities until he became completely independent in his work. At the end of his internship, Yousign offered him a job to continue the adventure with us.
Retrospective.
Feedback and lessons learnt.
What I learnt
This experience was extremely enriching, both on a personal and managerial level. Throughout this year of mentoring and tutoring, I significantly improved my communication and project management skills. Benjamin became a friend, and this wonderful collaboration allowed us to grow professionally together.
Benjamin's Feedback
I asked Benjamin to share his experience. Here's what he told me:
When I decided to join Code Academy, my biggest challenge was to understand the logic of programming and learn the basics of several languages in order to identify the specialization I liked. It wasn't easy because, being in professional reorientation, I was a complete novice in the world of web development.
So I decided to self-train before entering this program and I quickly enjoyed integrating my first web pages in HTML and CSS. By deepening my knowledge during the training and discovering several languages and web professions, I realized that front-end development best matched my aspirations, with a particular desire to improve my skills in web integration.
Thanks to this mentoring period, I was able to refine my professional aspirations and realize that a career as a web integrator was within my reach. Kevin perfectly embodied this path, and his guidance allowed me not only to progress technically, but also to gain confidence.
After this period of training and mentoring, I started a six-month internship at Yousign, with Kevin as my tutor. Although the internship was entirely remote, we often worked in a coworking space. I quickly gained autonomy, and the succession of concrete projects allowed me to progress very rapidly.
The end of my internship coincided with Kevin's departure from Yousign. Although I had not initially planned to be hired for his position, Yousign offered me to take over. I was thus entrusted with the responsibility for integrations for the website and blog.
Despite the stress and a very present impostor syndrome, I had to, from the start, code the blog redesign. This task would have been impossible without Kevin's guidance throughout my journey. This experience allowed me to measure how far I had come.
Next step
Once hired at Yousign, Benjamin took charge of the technical direction of the website. On my end, I decided to fully dedicate myself to freelancing and leave Yousign at the end of 2018. Nevertheless, our collaboration has continued for several years: Benjamin calls on me when he needs reinforcement. We have thus closely collaborated on the complete redesign of the website in 2019, and continue to work together on adding pages and features — notably the blog in 2022.
Kevin Bizien
UI Designer & Creative Developer
Want to tell me about your web project? Contact me at bonjour@kevinbizien.com and we can start talking soon!