The Java Academy experience

Hello everyone, my name is Sébastien. I am a BuSI consultant, recently graduated from the BuSI Academy as a member of its first Java promotion.

My pathway

Originally, I’m not from the IT world at all. I started by studying psychology, accountancy and even pursued catering training before diving into IT. Once I obtained my Bachelor degree in Computer Sciences, I quickly realized that companies are in fact seeking to recruit a specific kind of IT specialist: Java developers. Unfortunately, Java was not part of my skillset at that time. I was then confronted with a choice between two career paths: being a “tester” or returning to the books again as a student. I ended up choosing to become a Java student at the BuSI Academy even if it meant starting all over again.

Learning a new language was a real challenge for me. On my first day, I found out that my fellow Java academicians had already followed a six months training on this topic. I had to catch up. Fortunately, we quickly became a genuine team and could count on each other as we learned and grew. The team spirit was a real boost during the whole BuSI Academy journey.

The Java Academy principle

The aim of the academy is to train us in development best practices and in new technologies, in order to make us fully-fledged Java developers. Consequently, we were coached by a team of senior BuSI consultants. They were responsible for developing the courses, the platforms and setting the goals of the training programme. After each theoretical unit, we had to develop projects from scratch in order to practice what we had learned. Through this process, we gained a level of expertise in technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, Angular, JUnit, and so on. We also discovered new libraries and frameworks such as Lombok, Mockito, JPA, MapStruct.

Methodology & tools

We worked with the Scrum methodology, guided by senior professionals through the Agile path. Each morning we devoted a little bit of time to identifying strengths and areas for improvement.

We became familiar with professional tools such as Atlassian, which we used to implement our knowledge and share it via the company servers. These tools allowed us to quantify our efforts and even gave us an element of feedback by pinpointing our strengths and weaknesses. We could then estimate how much work and time we needed to dedicate to each task and project. This steadily improved our confidence in our skills as we moved forward through the practical cases. Our team projects helped us to grow both professionally and as individuals.

All in all, the BuSI Academy was a surprising, enriching and challenging experience. The projects we completed enabled us to grow as IT professionals. Thanks to those business simulations, I now believe that I have become a true BuSI consultant, ready to go on Java missions.