The self-declared CV is dead. Good riddance.

The self-declared CV is dead. Good riddance.

IT for Business published an article this week with an honest title: bootcamps are looking for a new legitimacy in the age of AI. I read in it the story of the end of a cycle. I did not read the end of a model. Here is why, and what we are doing about it at Holberton.

What is true

The junior market has closed up. This is not the impression of a tired recruiter; these are figures. Developer job postings on the APEC website fell by 20% in 2025. Hiring of professional and managerial staff in IT dropped 21% between 2023 and 2025. INSEE notes a 7.4% decline in salaried employment among 15-29-year-olds, excluding apprentices, in the last quarter of 2025. Across the Atlantic, the Fed estimates that around 500,000 developer jobs have not been created since large language models arrived in late 2022, and a Stanford team documents a drop in employment among 22-25-year-olds in the occupations most exposed to generative AI.

At the same time, technical tests no longer test anything. Anyone can produce code they don't understand. The portfolio no longer proves the work. The recruiter, who receives around a hundred applications per position, does what all buyers do under uncertainty: buys the known brand. The engineering degree becomes a shortcut again, not because it proves more, but because it reassures.

And the sector is paying the price. WebForce3 was taken over and then liquidated. Wild Code School went through receivership before being taken over by Simplon. The Grande École du Numérique, which had labelled Holberton, Simplon and Le Wagon and claims 45,000 people trained in ten years, was dissolved in January 2025.

What is false

The article suggests the problem is duration. Three months versus five years. That is not the point. The point is proof.

A long program proves nothing more than a short one if it relies on exams that AI takes for you. A short program is worth nothing if it ends in a self-declared certificate. What is dead is not the bootcamp; it is self-declared skill, whatever the length of the path that precedes it.

Look at who the companies cited in the article actually hired. A former management controller turned analytics engineer. A lawyer turned developer, then a mainstay of an AI team at Ubisoft. A journalist turned data scientist. Profiles in their thirties and forties, with a profession before code. Employers don't talk about their level in algorithmics. They talk about their ability to translate between the business and the technical side, to learn how to learn, to go the distance.

What these companies are buying is not a junior developer. It is a person whose skill has been observed in real conditions.

What we are changing at Holberton

For ten years, Holberton has operated without lectures. Learners code from day one, on projects, relying on one another. This model has trained thousands of developers. It is no longer enough as it stands, and we would rather say so ourselves.

When a machine writes the code, the skill shifts. It is no longer in the ability to produce a function; it is in the ability to instruct a system, test what it returns, verify what it claims, and decide what to do with it. That cannot be learned only by leaning on the person next to you. It requires solid conceptual foundations and someone who watches you work.

We are therefore releasing new programs designed for this reality. They keep what makes Holberton strong: projects and peer learning. They add what was missing: structured courses on the major concepts, taught by people who master them, and mentoring that follows each learner over time. Verification is treated as a core skill, not as a chapter. Our first fully rewritten module teaches you to instruct, test and verify an AI before learning to trust it.

This commits us to three points.

First, replacing the certificate with proof. A recruiter must be able to see what the person has built, how they were assessed by peers, mentors and professionals, and where their strengths and gaps lie. A report of observed skills is worth more than the title of a degree.

Second, ceasing to promise the junior web developer job to people with no experience. That is no longer a promise we can keep, and the market knows it. The needs are elsewhere. APEC reports 10% growth for data engineers in 2025. Cybersecurity remains the number one job in shortage according to Robert Half. The right promise is one of dual competence: a profession you already know, plus mastery of the data, cyber or AI that is transforming it. That is the purpose of the paths we are opening, from post-baccalaureate level to executives.

Finally, publishing our results. The article cites four satisfied employers and no placement rate. No one in this sector publishes a six- and twelve-month figure verified by a third party. The first to do so will take the lead on trust. We want to be that one.

A question for you

If you hire technical profiles, what would make you trust a candidate today beyond the name of a school? A three-week test in real conditions, as proposed by the Rennes incubator Alt? An apprentice lab attached to your IT department, like BPCE's Lab42, which hired 13 of its last 17 apprentices? Something else?

Reply to me. I will read everything, and the next letter will report back.

Nathalie Le Palmec
Deputy CEO, Holberton

Sources: IT for Business, September 24, 2026; Le Monde, April 3, 2026 (APEC, 2026 edition; INSEE, economic outlook, March 2026); Next, May 2026 (Fed, March 2026); Brynjolfsson et al., Canaries in the Coal Mine, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2025; IT for Business, May 2026 (Robert Half, Numeum); Centre Inffo, June 2023; Le Monde Informatique, July 2025; Légifrance, order of January 8, 2025; Groupe BPCE, 2023 and 2024.

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