Elium Academy

Prior to joining Elium Academy, I was working in a multi-national company as a Solution Architect. I decided to learn Full-stack Web Development to improve my technical skills and gain a fresh perspective in modern coding practices as well as to expand my network and I got just that!.

This has been one of my valuable investments as it has given me a jumpstart to explore new areas in my career path as well as create new opportunities for me to gracefully transition into starting my own business.

After an extensive online search for the best bootcamp in terms of cost and content, I finally settled Elium Academy. The campus is located in the central part of Brussels and the classes are held in small group for maximum participation.

With respect to the curriculum, there is a good blend of theory and lots of hand-on practice with assistance from the trainers if required. Students are given theoretical lectures in the mornings and given the chance to apply the knowledge during the afternoons in the form of code alongs, projects and team work.

There is a business Lecture which happens once every week. During this period, students are given valuable lectures on the latest trends and technologies to help build the right perspective on what they can expect with the skills that they acquire.

This program is good for Individuals who are passionate about learning web development but do not know where to start from. You will be given a good exposure of the major technologies and the right fundamentals to be able to continue learning any technology you settle on. Take note that most of the effort will be on the individual. You must be commited to put in the hours and the trainers are more than willing to support.

I was disappointed about the fact that the Campus could not comply to their accommodation package as stated on the website during application however, the resources available were kind enough to help me with relevant details to secure one for myself.

Hi i'm Steven, founder of Earnieland, the Robin Hood of the e-commerce. As a startup we spend already a lot of money via normal advertising campaigns to reach the smart online shoppers. We learned that word of mouth and referrals are the best to acquire customers. But there is a lot of noise, rumour and competition out there. In order to create the lowest customer acquisition cost, we need to growthhack things. So we decided to do this growthhack accademy. Together with 3 skilled people in automation, engineering and marketing i will follow the three months course. We will experiment, analyse data real quickly and make the right decisions to realise an exponential growth in 2017.

The projects seemed very simple, but when I started asking for more guidance I could see how they were actually very well designed.  The projects in the curriculum were never flashy, but they taught me very important lessons about software development like reading and writing specifications, separation of concerns, modular architecture, and user-focused design.  If I hadn't been asking for help and trying to build the projects like I was supposed to (instead of just making them work) they would have felt like a waste of time.  It would have been easy to slack and not learn the study techniques they were trying to teach, but I can see now those were the most valuable lessons they were teaching.

I'm now a junior developer at a crypto startup and use these skills every day. I don't think I would have been able to keep up if it weren't for the study techniques I learned from the Elium teachers.

The community at Elium is also special.  Since graduating I've moved to Brussels and still see other alumni every day.  Plus I'm still getting help from the instructors 3 months later, couldn't ask for more.

My only regret about Elium is that I hadn't prepared enough before.  Study hard before you come!

I was student at Elium Full Stack Web Dev Course. I highly recommend the course. The quality / price rate is enormous. I would recommend the course for anyone who wants to make a career shift or wants to launch his own product. At the end of the course I was able to create my own platform for the business idea I had. I was mentoring by Evan, George and Laurens and all of them were great at teaching as well as helping out when I got stuck.

I wouldn't recommend it for someone who is not willing to put 50-60 hours of work per week, this is not for lazy people ;-)

Simas

Elium academy is a real bootcamp, very though but worth it! You progress extremly fast if you put in the hard work! Study before, do an online course if you can, HTML, CSS, JS basic are a must have. A plus if you can study a bit Node, Express and React a bit before. The teachers will push you very hard. To keep up, you must understand the concepts really fast but do not worry if you are behind they will be there for you to catch up!  Elium is also unique because you have the possibility to work on a concret business idea. David is a great mentor so I can really only recommend Elium to anyone who wants to learn good bases in the new technologies of Web Dev and to become an entrepreneur in the tech industry !

I was one of the student of the previous growth hacking bootcamp !

My name is olivier and during my training at the elium academy, we had to face a acquisition challenge for a company. 

Me and my team learnt a lot about the basics of growth hacking and we used a lot hacking tools that were incredible to face our challenge. Personnaly, I wanted to tackle a new challenge after my degree in business ingineering and my profezionnal experience. I think this bootcamp was the perfect way to combine the theorie that I acquired at the beginning with a real case challenge.

By the way, the mentors are really profezionnal and their advices really worth it. They helped us to define the different experiments that would fit the best to the challenge of our company and it worked really well.

Th atmosphere was awesome. Company, Mentors were totally available to respond to our questions and always with the smile.

I strongly advice to the people that are looking for an exciting challenge that lead to rewarding experience to apply to this bootcamp. I feel way more confinent after this bootcamp and ready to run my own business.

I don't know what's better - the community and environment you're part of, or how much you actually learn thanks to the availability and knowledgability of the mentors.

I was looking for a short, intensive and hands-on training to acquire some marketing skills and maybe even enter the new exciting field of growth hacking. Elium seemed to offer precisely what I was looking for so I applied.

The price tag was more than reasonable so I had my doubts but a few weeks in, I was convinced my investment was well worth it. The strong points of the academy were in my opinion:

1. The environment full of young, motivated, and entrepreneurial souls - David really supports and helps students with their entrepreneurial ideas!

2. The practical aspect very focused on learning by doing (You actually work on a project at a scale-up in the Benelux for 10 weeks!)

3. The resources you have access to - powerful tools like Benchmark, Ahrefs, Drift, .. and the openness of mentors who have access to a huge network

If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me at: maximaxbigup@gmail.com

Hi, 

I am Aloise, graduated student from the Growth hacking bootcamp, organized by Elium Academy. 

This experience allowed me to become a growth hacker in 3 months: before starting, I only had few knowledge of what it was. During those 3 months, I met some difficulties, it was intense, but at the end, it was an exceptional challenge with passionate mentors who helped me to get the most out of my experience. 

Now, I am able to build my own MVP. Even if I am autonomous, I still have some questions, and in that case, I can always ask to one of the Elium mentors, who are glad to help me. 

If you have a question, you can reach me by email: aloise20@gmail.com

A fantastic experience!

I can only speak as an intern of the company, though all the students I have spoken to are very happy with their decision to follow a bootcamp at Elium. :)

The mentors and the founders of the company I work with on a daily basis are among the most competent (and funny!) people I've ever met ; to learn from them is a real privilege. Every day is a challenge, there are lots of things to learn, and I couldn't believe the confidence and trust they all had in me when I arrived. I was given lots of responsabilities from day one, and the students of the bootcamps I have spoken to feel the same about their apprenticeship. 

The company is situated next to the European Commission offices of Brussels. It's very animated and has lots of restaurants and beautiful places. It's actually a very New-York like kind of place :D 

It's a great place to learn and have fun at the same time, whether as an employee or a student. You won't regret your investment! 

TLDR

I learnt a lot and now I have a job

More in depth

I worked hard before the course to do the pre-requisites. I worked really hard during the course to complete everything.

It wasn't easy but the mentors challenged and helped me. Ultimately you get out what you put in.

Before Applying

DO NOT TAKE ANY COURSE IF YOU HAVE  NEVER TRIED CODING. Some students joined who had never coded before, not a great experience. There is no bootcamp on the planet that will put out a perfect job ready developer in 3 months. You will get a lot more out of a bootcamp if you learn the complete basics first, It's boring and takes time and there's no point paying to be at a bootcamp to just sit at a laptop doing basic tutorials that you could have done at home.

Also by doing this you might find that you really hate coding. at it is a much better thing to find out before paying for a course and wasting a lot of time and money...

(This has nothing to do with elium specifically, in fact if you really want to take a course with doing no coding  beforehand they are more flexible here than on other courses so you will at least learn something)

Overall
This was their first course and some of the teaching wasn't the smoothest but they took a lot of feedback and the plans for the next course are looking much better.

The curriculum of React, Node, Express also seems really sensible in terms of where the tech industry is going if you're looking for jobs. Or if you want to launch your own things it is also a sensible stack in terms of scalability and possibility to use React Native to make mobile apps

Pedro the tech mentor really knows his s#!t

Juan the biz mentor really knows his s#!t

Alejandro the design mentor really knows his s#!t

Brussels is nice and easy to get by in if you aren't a local. You don't need to learn french. the student housing is good.

First, let me quickly introduce myself. I'm Bert, a CompSci student with an interest (and some experience) in nonprofits/startups.

I decided to participate in this course to acquire knowledge about web development, specifically in an entrepreneurial context which was exactly what I learned.

The curriculum of consists of a combination of (technical & start-up-related)lectures, exercises and project weeks where we needed to work together on a larger project which was a great introduction to software development in a working environment.

The instructors are really diverse in both the level and method they teach concepts so it is possible for both fast- and slow-paced students to follow the course.

An area in which the course really shines is the job assistance. They have quite a broad network and arrange meeting opportunities with a lot of business owners and managers.

In conclusion, Elium is a great way to start you journey in web development. If you want more information, feel free to contact me (bert.d.vl.schouwer@gmail.com).

After so many months of self-teaching how to write/read maintainable code, I realized there was a big problem standing in front of me and my ultimate goal of becoming a developer. When you don’t see evident progress in learning and understanding some programming language (preferably the one you choose yourself), even after countless hours staring in the computer screen….two reasons emerge. First one is that most of online tutorials/books are not good enough, and the second one is a teacher. That teacher was nobody else then myself! Yes, I was terrible teacher who needed to change his approach, and that’s how my programming story begins.

Learning to code without any technical background and starting from zero, but with big desire to learn just to mention, is very hard. Believe me I was there! So lets summarize...i was capable of teaching myself how to code until certain extent when the `learning curve` become so steep that started to resemble more like an enormous unclimbable wall. Again, in this situation there are two options, to continue by yourself and some day eventually become developer (if stubborn enough), or try to find someone who can help you learn more then basics in reasonable amount of time.

Decision was made, I fired teacher and started googling to find his substitute. “Programming bootcamps in Europe”, “JavaScript bootcamp in Europe” “Belgium coding bootcamps”…. AHA! I found interesting website (coursereport.com) giving me all necessary information’s to narrow down my choice. There were two options Ruby on Rails or Node.JS/Javascript. JS was something I always wanted to learn, so it was an easy decision. Elium Academy here I come.

13 weeks of learning Html, Css, Bootstrap, JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, React, Git, Github...with a very important soft skills sessions related to IT industries passed briefly. Amazing working space in the Brussels European quarter, with bunch of students from different backgrounds coming from different countries gave a special kind of touch to a first batch of `Elium Innovators` how they called us.

Just to be clear and honest from the beginning of my review, it was not easy for anybody. Students coming from different backgrounds with different knowledge in programming gave quite a headaches to teachers who were struggling to adapt curriculum to our needs, but still trying to cover all relevant topics in order for us to become full stack web developers. Did we become full stack web developers in `full capacity` in just a 13 weeks is a question for each one of us, but did we learned important things since the beginning of bootcamp and are we on the way of becoming very good developers with strong foundation?! Certainly yes, and there is no doubt about it!

Each start is difficult, Elium was too, mine the same, my fellow friends (Elium innovators) also...i know there were times of doubt in ourselves and personal capacities to learn, doubt in our teachers and their ability to transfer knowledge, doubt in idea of becoming a developer in general. But in one thing I am assured is that we all tried! In most of the cases this experience was completely new to all of us and that is completely ok. We all learned a lot, most of graduates already started get interviewed for developer positions in various start ups and companies, and Elium is getting prepared for its second batch of `Innovators`. Progress is evident.

So, if you are ready to step among developers and eventually be called `Innovator` and Elium alumni, this community welcomes you.

P.S. Do the pre-course material thoroughly, and if stuck...well call alumnus, we’ll be more then happy to help!

Hi I am Nyeem, I have done the full stack program in 2016.

First of all my point of vue on bootcamps : 
A bootcamp kickstart's you. It gives you the right tool, the right path to take. It encourages you, it pushes you. It gives you the desire to learn more. But in the end it's up to you. If you're not fully devoted(because that's how should be) you end up b*****ing about everything... At the end of the program you are supposed have solid grounds for starting your developer journey. You're not a developer yet. And for me, Elium is perfectly doing it's job now that the wheels are turning after having some troubles at the early weeks.

You have to look at the reality instead of lying to yourself beacause of whatever advertisement a Bootcamp made. You don't become a professional developer in 13 weeks when people are passing years in self-learning or in college for getting a degree.
Some beginner's mistakes were indeed made by Elium for organizing this first batch but I believe it is a good experience and it will be much better in the batches to come.

We learn from our mistakes, I'm sure Elium will do that too for the next batch. As an analogy, think of you at the beginning of your job seeker life. If everyone expects hiring people with experience and no one want to give a job to a non experienced persone how would you expect acquire that experience? For me the same applies to Elium. You can't make everything perfect from the first batch. Otherwise you pay also the price... ;)

Additionally, I want to talk about the mentors, they are not only very nice, supportive and knowledgeable of coding and entrepreneurship, but are also very complementary. During my time at Elium I not only stablish a relationship of student-mentor with them, but also of friend and I believe that for my personal development having people that advice me on every aspect I needed was a key aspect during the program.

-not a bot, neither an Elium intern :p

Started as a happy bootcamper with Elium,even though initially it looked bit tough with my lack of programming skills,I am indeed glad that I am making the learning through things gradually.

Even though there is a difference among the team members operating at different levels as each of us comes from different back grounds.I understood that it also helped us to share our individual expertise among us.The course is aimed to get out the best coding skills from us by constantly giving practise exercises and pushing us to traverse through them.I feel like I earned more knowledge after stepping into Elium Bootcamp than ever and this 3 months is worth every moment of my time spent.I can put up my questions over slack any time and I am sure they got answered promptly each time.The meet ups which Elium is organizing is providing me knowledge with more Technical aspects I am not aware of.

While most people dream of becoming a doctor, a policeman or a lawyer, when they are younger, I was dreaming of being an entrepreneur who worked in different sectors . When I started coding , I spent hours per week reading all sorts of books, articles, blogs and online courses to acquire the technical skills that I need to live my dream. I wanted to be able to understand the whys and wherefores

of the tech industry. After one year of self taught programming , I had a strong feeling that something was missing. Indeed, in order to fully understand this environment and feel ready to work as a junior developer, I needed to study the technical layer, needed to be able to code with a team or alone. Therefore, as usual, I naively began on my own by consulting articles to solve the mystery of startup’s products! I even at one point decided to browse resumes of emblematic characters of the Tech industry. I came to the conclusion that a significant portion of them have in their backgrounds technical skills.

Since I have a curious mind and I am always eager to learn new skills no matter how long or how hard the skill is , I decided in August to quit my job and enroll at Elium Academy. I will be graduating from Elium in one month, and it was the best jump forward I have ever done, certainly the most valuable decision for an entrepreneur who is passionate about Tech. My expectations were high concerning the Full stack Program.

I joined Elium with a very ambitious goals when it came to my skills and I am not disappointed unlike my colleagues.

THE BEST EXPERIENCE A NEWBIE PROGRAMMER COULD ASK FOR:

I have this saying “if you expect knowledge and techniques to be brought to you on a silver plate like the way thing are taught at school, you are delusional”

coding is about learning how to learn and google things. The Elium team do it with faultless functioning. They designed a program in a way to make learning more attractive and straightforward,

The range of resources and tools built in-house fit our needs and are always up to date.

The hard skills you learn are relevant and straightforward. You learn the core concepts of the web development with an approach that tends to reach an operational autonomy. You will be able to deal with API, frameworks, database, collaboration tool like Github and many other.

The learning speed is high and the time flies out when you are in front of your computer 10 hours per day, it can be disconcerting at first. For my part it wasn’t, but I have to warn you “ you become right away addict”. The funny thing is that the staff can be disconcerting too regarding their full beliefs and trust in the program. Their faith in your success comes from the program itself. And I had no doubt about that from the very first Skype call we had,

First of all, I think that one of the main strengths of Elium is their network in the Startup and Tech industry. Most of the people I met share a positive mindset, a sharing spirit with a contagious motivation. The mix of ages, backgrounds, and meet ups allow a real exchange between people. As a young junior developer , I learned every day from the sharing spirit of my colleagues, teachers and all the interesting people who are co-working @SmartWork.

The apprenticeship is not limited to learning technical skills with best practices because learning how to code is about developing your developer mindset. It is through this mindset that you reach a real operational autonomy. An important part of the pedagogy is learning how to google for the correct info, methods, techniques, services. This is a key to understand better coding culture and be able to make progress. Now when an idea comes through my mind or when I scroll the web, I immediately try to think in terms of components and technical issues, which makes me more pertinent and pragmatic. I discover a product driven way of thinking and tackling web products.

Elium paved the way for my career as an entrepreneur and developer, all the information you learn during the course can be reviewed and improved.

For that reason, the master word is practice makes permanent. So actually I try to improve what I have learned on a freelance projects or reading other developers code on github.

When you are stuck, you can count on the Elium community to always give you a reply no matter the time. The community is very active, alumnus, teachers constantly pull together to deal with code issues or to share quality information and resources. When I read the Slack of the community, I always feel the urge to go broad and develop my skills; there is a spreading emulation.

One word about Elium if you think the lack of tech skills is a barrier and it’s holding you back….Trust me your wrong it’s a strength.

I know that there is now a before and an after the Bootcamp, and I can already feel like nothing will ever be the same again. 

Here is my email incase you want to check this review : nadiaaime17@gmail.com this review  was inspired by another review i read online that inspired me

I applied in this school back in July having built Web apps with Meteor. When the course started (first batch) in September I d learnt python and used already the flask framework.

The first week, the first day in fact they taught functional programming(!) and they went as deep as map and reduce functions! The course was supposed to be for total beginners. The second week they tried to teach express (following an online CRUD tutorial). They tried to do that to people that didn t understand how to use arrays and objects to save data.

By that week, they admited that I was to advanced for this course because it was for entrepreneurs and not for programmers. So I quited. They seemed to be totally unprepared for the people that arrived there with different levels of programming experience.

The course was built on top of nothing basically - they were sharing only slides with the students. No material to read. Very few exercises and the weekend projects were only description on how to implement something. No test-driven development which in my opinion is necessary. Of course that way, people had very different solutions and they couldnt help you with the problems you might encounter.

I used the workspace for one more month by the end of which they admitted they couldnt teach a lot of people.

They have things on their curicculum that they wont touch at all (like postgresql). And finally as for the job assistance, Elium is a startup so they have other connections with startups which are very happy to offer internships.

All in all, I would strongly suggest to anyone interested to look elsewhere either an online paid course (there are some amazing ones) or a free online course and save money and time from this Elium course.

Curriculum:
The tech stack they were teaching (node.js/react/mongodb) is modern and highly in demand in the market right now, but they didn't really go in depth with explaining any of it. They just showed us some basics, gave us links to a bunch of online resources and each week they gave us some trivial projects to do on our own. We got to build a few small projects during the course, like a calculator, tic-tac-toes game and a basic CRUD interface but by the end of the course nobody had a fully finished webpage or portfolio to show to potential employers.

Instructors:
One of the instructors was pretty good, he tried his best to explain things in simple terms and guide everyone in the right direction to the best of his ability. The other one was useless.

Job Assistance:
None. You're on your own.

Overall:
The course was one of the cheapest bootcamps in Europe at the time and you get what you pay for.

I have chosen the Full Stack Web Development course of Elium due to all those good reviews this Academy received. The teachers were very friendly and also quite skillful, considering that none of them had any working experience in Web Development. The price of this bootcamp, compared to others, as i.e. General Assembly in London, Coding Academy in Barcelona or Spiced Academy in Berlin, seems very attractive. Hence my choice of this course.

However, after 3 months of course, no student in class graduated with a portfolio. A portfolio in IT is the essence of success during the application process that follows the bootcamp. Further, there was no job assistance or help in how to deal with future technical interviews (i.e. mock interviews would have been very helpful at this stage, to prepare students for those 'new' situations).

Also, the class never received any lectures on Facebooks' Framework 'React.js'. Considering, that it was listed in the Academys' Curriculum and that it is currently a desired and requested Framework by many potential employers, it is highly regrettable that it was never taught.

There are already quite a few Coding Bootcamps in Europe. Next time, I propably would choose for one that might be slightly more expensive, but that at least keeps what it promises.