I’m sorry to use the uncategorized category, but I don’t know where to put this.
This morning I had a meeting with the Director of the EQL school in Paris. EQL stands for Ecole de la Qualité Logicielle (School for software quality).
This school was created in 2012 as part of a group called Henix, specialized in testing as well.
They target unemployed people who wants to change career and try the software/web industry. EQL has around 250 students a year (from 25 to 35 years old) with various programs (short term to long term training, including graduate education).
They also have development and PO (both Agile and non agile) curriculum.
I won’t go in the detail of the programs, but what is interesting is that they train students on the Squash software https://www.squashtest.com/ which is an open source software they have created and are maintaining. But they do include one day training of their biggest competitor Quality center.
I’m mentioning this, as the current EQL director joined Henix in 2001, so he understood very well the challenges of keeping an open source tool up-to-date and well tested.
Their testing students are certified ISTQB (never heard before, but apparently quite big in the sector 
)
They do partnership with companies in order to either pre-hire their students (mandatory for tester), or help their PO and dev students to get an internship.
Indeed, I don’t think we will be able to hire tester through this school as they demand their future testers to be hired before the training start. Besides, they want them to be hired full time. Their usual workflow (for tester only) is this:
- Motivated unemployed people apply online and do a series of logic tests.
- If the tests are OK, they get a meeting with the school, which purpose is to validate that their motivation are genuine
- For those selected, they will then work with them to improve their resume and do meetings simulations.
- When future testing students are ready, they match their profile with enterprises needs (we could for example say we want to work only with people having a good level in English)
- The enterprises meet the selected students and see if they want to hire them
To become a partner for the testing curriculum, enterprises must pay 5000 euros 
but they never had a non profit knocking at their door, so this can be negotiated.
In short, this cannot work for us, unless another company / non profit has also testing needs and we mutualize our efforts.
We agreed however to one next step: I will be invited to a student project presentation (their teachers are building fake but realistic cases that they need to address in 5 days). This will give me an idea of how they work and help me meet other companies working with the school and also former students.
The latter could be interesting for us as they are now “free” from the school program and can decide to work for the project they want.
PO and devs have also testing training as part of their program. So if we want to have PO interns at some point, this can also be interesting.