SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today the Holberton School, the prestigious two-year college alternative for software engineers, added industry heavy weights Docker CTO Solomon Hykes, Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel and CloudNOW CEO Jocelyn DeGance Graham to its Board of Trustees, joining Grammy-Award winner recording artist NE-YO. Holberton also announced that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has joined as an advisor and investor, joining AirBNB’s Louis Monier.

Holberton is funded by Trinity Ventures, Daphni, Reach Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Partech Ventures, as well as a number of individual investors, including Slideshare co-founder and CTO Jon Boutelle, NE-YO and now Weiner. Holberton also has more than 100 mentors including Ayesha Mazumdar, UX Engineer at Salesforce, Tammy Butow, Engineering Manager at Dropbox, Casey Brown, Manager Site Reliability Engineering at LinkedIn and more.

Launched in 2016, Holberton’s curriculum is based on a methodology that combines project-based and peer learning where students help each other to learn and reach goals. At Holberton, there are no lectures and no teachers, but instead tech mentors. Students acquire practical skills and an understanding of theory through hands-on learning. This guarantees that students possess the skills necessary for the technology industry's most demanding jobs. Holberton students have attained prestigious positions at some of the top tech companies in the US and around the world, working at companies such as Apple, Tesla, NASA, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Docker and more.

"Holberton is producing remarkable, Ivy League-caliber graduates, without the costs, the time or the prerequisites. I should know, we hired two of them before they even graduated,” said Weiner, LinkedIn CEO. “Talent is everywhere, but with our education system stuck in a centuries-old training format, many are not even given the chance to try. And a lot of graduates are having a hard time keeping up with the rate of change once they become professionals. Holberton’s education model is attracting students from all walks of life, and is providing them with the skills they need to take on a job after graduation, and more importantly to be able to continually retrain their entire life to take on new opportunities.”

“Holberton has been providing a type of education that I myself experienced and that led me to create Docker,” said Hykes, Founder, CTO and Chief Architect of Docker and the creator of the Docker open source initiative. “I am a strong advocate of the project-based and peer-learning format that will train the next generation of highly successful tech entrepreneurs.”

“High-quality education should be accessible to everyone, not just the elite,” said Graham, Diversity Partner Liaison to Google Cloud, and the Founder of Cloud-NOW.org, a 501c3 non profit focused on championing women in cloud. “Holberton is taking a leadership role in diversity and inclusion by training women and minorities, and helping them secure jobs at some of the most prestigious companies in the world. It is only by making all voices heard, that we can expect to effect the greatest changes in our society.”

“As we are entering the 4th industrial revolution, workers need to constantly retrain to stay relevant, and the rate of change is accelerating,” said Kasriel, the CEO of the world’s largest freelancing website, Upwork. He is also the co-chair of the World Economic Forum's council on the future of education, gender and work. "Holberton is training students on learning to learn, which is the most important skill our workforce needs,” he said. 

“When you think of jobs and networking, you think LinkedIn, and with Jeff’s long-standing commitment to education, he will be a valuable asset to the school and of course, our students,” said Julien Barbier, CEO and co-founder of Holberton. “And having Solomon, Stephane, and Jocelyn join the Board of Trustees gives Holberton access to some of the smartest most successful people in tech.”

In just its first year, Holberton students have received renown participating in a number of different projects and events. From hosting the first ever International Botathon to holding a session on innovative ways to play Pokemon Go by staying home. The school's numerous achievements included introducing highly qualified mentors from well-known companies, articles published under both student and founders, and even having one student receive a coveted internship at NASA's SETI Institute. Holberton is the winner of the EdTech Digest Awards Program 2017 and was featured in The New York Times emphasizing diversity.

The school charges no upfront tuition. Instead, graduates are asked to contribute a percentage of their salaries to the school for the first three years of their post-Holberton employment, giving back to the next generation of software engineers. If not hired, students pay nothing to the school. Their success is the school’s success.

Holberton boasts a remarkably diverse student body. Women comprise 40 percent, and people of color comprise 53 percent of its student population. Holberton’s automated admissions process was specifically designed to reduce human bias, resulting in one of the most diverse learning institution.

Students interested can apply here. Please visit www.holbertonschool.com for information about enrollment and opportunities.

About Holberton School
Using project-based learning and peer learning, Holberton’s mission is to train the best software engineers of their generation. At Holberton, there are no formal teachers and no formal courses. Instead, everything is project-centered. Holberton gives students increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve and minimal initial directions on how to solve them. As a consequence, students naturally look for the theory and tools they need, understand them, use them, work together, and help each other. Holberton School teaches how to learn instead of teaching a specific tool or programming language. Holberton School is based in San Francisco and supported by leaders from the technology industry. Go to www.holbertonschool.com to learn more. 

Editorial Contact
Joe Eckert
jeckertflak@gmail.com