How our partnership started
At first, we focused on increasing the number of interns at all level, licence, university of reconversion program, in order to accelerate the interactions between IPL students, professors and La Redoute. In parallel, this allowed us to identify open classrooms to perform. They took place during a student course session, allowing to enrich a specific track of learning for the students with real-world and enterprise use-cases and experience sharing. Various were done, from infrastructure, cloud, security, software quality, also careers and soft skills within the IT area.
How we were able to contribute
The regular sharing allowed to be present to the regular event organized by the IPL, namely the Job fair, Pedagogic Days, where we also intervene in talks during the conference program. The last ones were a talk on Security during the ICT Girls Days, and an intervention on Machine Learning & AI, during the pedagogic days. In parallel, we also organized visits to the company for groups of students of various levels, for them to have a presentation of La Redoute as a whole and its subsidiary in Leiria, managing the local brand, plus a finance and technology center.
How we sustain the collaboration
Not being the primary goal, some students gain more interest in collaborating within La Redoute after having done an internship, talk with us at the fair, or just knowing the technological stack and possible projects to work on. Regular interns are present inside La Redoute or working remotely at the IPL, either on investigation project, or on a deliverable realistic to perform during the internship period. We’ll keep this constant flow of interns, as also allowing for people in La Redoute to progress on coaching people and delivering projects that can be difficult with the day to day workload.
How our partnership will evolve
We are happy with the current partnership, and are working to improve it constantly, our next priorities will be to finalize a prize for an investigation project of Virtual Reality focusedon clothing and retail, establish a Lab between IPL and La Redoute focused on technological innovation. We will also focus on working as partners and for instance, appear together in major events like Web Summit in Lisbon, and organize jointly events, like Meetups within the Leiria area with the TICE.Leiria group. Next year we will also be sponsoring two Master students in their studies
I want personally to thank all the people that have contributed for this partnership to grow and to be still improving today, namely Vitor Távora , Fernando Da Silva, Mário Antunes, Nuno Rodrigues, Carlos Grilo, , Catarina Reis, Nuno Rodrigues (Vice-Presidente of IPL), and also people that did participate in La Redoute.