Simon Malaret | Becoming independent with Nocode

A graduate in Audiovisual and Marketing, Simon, a student from the first class of the Alegria.academy, finally set his sights on Nocode. He is currently doing his internship at Alegria.group.

Background

At only 23 years old, Simon already has a very dense career path - marked by university exchanges, training and various internships. His thirst for learning and his curiosity have pushed him to take an atypical path, but far from being incoherent.

Despite a brilliant school career (baccalaureate - S route - at 16, after 2 skipped classes...), Simon had no professional future plan. He left for the United States to live an experience abroad and improve his English for a year.

Back from Louisiana, Simon chose to get closer to audiovisual and graphic creation at the IUT Multimédia of Grenoble, before doing a Master's degree in Marketing, Communication and Advertising - including a year at Boston University. These studies were the gateway to this more tech world where he was able to notably approach the concepts of web development with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and even WordPress 😉.

Finally, he finished his studies with a very rewarding internship at Sporttesting - a startup specialized in data analysis about the sports performance of high-level athletes. And as in most young projects, the scope of the missions is very broad. Simon had to quickly face budgetary and human resources constraints and take in hand Webflow, Notion or Make (ex-Integromat).

He first learns about these Nocode tools by talking to people around him - in particular with the companies that surround him at the Village, a startup gas pedal in Grenoble. Then he draws his knowledge and skills from his readings and tests of the tools he discovers.

Interview with Simon

Why did you turn to Nocode and Alegria.academy?

I wasn't specifically looking for Nocode training at the time. I wanted to develop my skills on my own and eventually go freelance. But I came across an article about Alegria.academy - which was launching its 15-month training program. Alegria seemed to be the reference at the time. I applied directly.

What are your impressions of the first 3 months?

Personally, my impressions so far are very positive. First of all, I was marked by the will to really think about being as useful as possible for the student. I find that Alegria.academy is faithful to its mission of teaching tech to people who do not necessarily have a technical background. This is not the case for all courses.

I also found the face-to-face/remote system interesting because it is designed to fit the current professional situation.

NB: The three-month core curriculum is given at a rate of one week per month in class and three weeks in distance learning.

These three months made me progress a lot. In fact, we started by learning the general concepts of web development (database, HTML/CSS/JS for example) - and this helped me a lot to better understand the Nocode tools in the rest of the program. It helped us to get into good habits right away.

In parallel, we had to carry out several very concrete projects to apply all that we learned.

What is your role in the company today?

I joined Alegria.group for my work-study program where I have - for the moment - three main missions.

1. I'm responsible for the whole automation part for Alegria.academy where I use Make, Airtable and Webflow all the time. I have to make sure that the workflows work well and that the data communicate well between each tool. In particular, I work on the follow-up of applications where each applicant has his or her own personal follow-up space.
2. I also help the teaching team automate reminders to save them time and allow them to focus on what they do best.
3. I also work for Alegria.tech, the Nocode Studio, for Webflow projects.

I am very happy today. Alegria brings me a lot of business sensitivity and rigorous work to meet the company's objectives.

What's next ?

I'm definitely interested in staying at Alegria. Depending on the offers, the initial idea of going freelance and joining Alegria.network - their Nocode Maker community - is still in the corner of my mind!

In the medium/long term, I would love to bootstrap projects.

Meet people, travel, work from wherever I want. Finally, the goal is to increase my skills to be as independent as possible.