Dear all,
FAC6 begins in two weeks and I just wanted to give you an overview of the setup here and on the revised syllabus and timetable.
As some of you may already know, we are a social enterprise and freelance co-operative. None of the teaching or mentoring staff is paid for their time; teaching is part of our process of learning and almost all of your mentors will have recently been through the programme themselves.
For all the help you will receive, you will need to rely on your own wits and the support of each other for your own learning. We hope we will be able to give you some useful guidance, but the success of the next few months will depend largely on you.
The first eight weeks, which begins on September 14th, has some significant changes from last time, but the structure remains pretty much as it has been since FAC2, with the emphasis on a series of weekly projects.
The second part of the course starts on November 9th with a longer two-week project where we will introduce you to the full FAC development stack. After the 10th week, we will expect you to have a good grounding in the software that we use.
In Weeks 11 and 12, we will present four practice projects from within FAC. These will be your first projects with people who are as invested in the outcome of your project as you are.
From December 7th onwards, you will be able to start to work freelance on commercial projects and, if you like, to begin to look for permanent employment. We expect to be able to line up some commercial projects for you, but you will also need to go out and hustle. Guidance will be provided.
You will be free to continue to base yourself at the campus until FAC7 begins on January 18th. After that, if you wish to continue to remain with us, you will be expected to contribute to the programme in any one of a number of ways.
It is probably worth talking about your job prospects. The message on this has been changing rapidly over the past few months. The first version of this course, which ran in early 2014, produced just one person who successfully found work as a software developer; the second just two.
In contrast, the overwhelming majority of our recent Summer cohort are working as developers and over half are still part of the setup here and working freelance. Average freelance rates are increasing, too.
We now run a recruitment agency for both permanent and contract staff, which for the first time since we started at the beginning of the year is allowing us to pay the rent directly from income. Directors’ salaries will hopefully follow before the end of the year.
A couple of our more experienced alumni have set up their own company and are now employing more recent graduates, through our agency, on a freelance basis.
To have several of our graduates working together, being paid well and both benefiting from, and contributing to, the space is a highly significant development in the development of the organisation. We hope, over time, more such offshoots will follow.
We fully expect you to have the opportunity in future weeks to take something of value from your experience here and eventually to give something back.
Dan Sofer