Recruited by Google in 2015, Estelle Yomba is currently Senior Technical Program Manager at Google. She first worked for “Google Chrome”, before being transferred to Google Cloud Compute Engine, the Infrastructure “as a Service” component of Google Cloud Platform, built on the global infrastructure that runs Google’s search engine , Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine allows users to launch virtual machines on demand.
Estelle Yomba is also the founder of “Sunshine Africa Education” and “Seven Group” whose objective is to solve the problem of low economic growth in Francophone Africa through quality education focused on practice and digital transformation. . In 2018, the Group launched “Seven Advanced Academy”, a computer engineering training institute with international standards, based in Douala, Cameroon.
Prior to taking on the position of Senior Technical Manager at Google, Estelle Yomba was a software engineer from 2015, when she was hired at Google and worked on the Google Chrome Internet browser. “When I was contacted to apply, I was a little reluctant because I had other things that were actually taking up a lot of my time. At that time, I was doing a Masters in Engineering Management at California State University and had a full time job as a Software Engineer at eBay. I knew how tedious the interview process at Google can be. Sometimes up to three months of a rigorous interview process. However, the recruiters at Google were so smart and convinced me of the simplicity and liveliness of the interview, so I gave in. I went for the interview and got hired as an engineer in Google Chrome. Through hard work and dedication to service, I was promoted to various positions from Engineer to Technical Program Manager.I worked with Google Chrome and now I have been transferred to Google Cloud (Computer Engine) ”, said Estelle Yomba in an interview with mimimefoinfos.com. Long before, in 2013, Estelle Yomba worked for eBay Inc as a software engineer.
From Cameroon to Silicon Valley
Born in 1989 in Nkongsamba, Moungo division in the Cameroonian Littoral region, Estelle Yomba describes herself on her site as a social entrepreneur with an unquenchable passion for quality education. “My academic and professional life has been characterized by the little word ‘minority’ , ” she explains.
Estelle Yomba is the youngest of a family of eight children. “So at home I always tried to make my voice heard as the smallest. During my primary school years at the Annex Public School in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, I was the youngest in school and was always bullied. The feeling of prejudice as a minority in every place I was in continued in high school as I was still the smallest in the class but the brightest ”.
The feeling of minority, explains Estelle Yomba, was made worse by the fact that she always found herself among the boys because her comrades always left her isolated, without her knowing why .
“At the Manengoumba high school in Nkongsamba, Estelle Yomba lost her mother and 2 years later her father. “It was a difficult pill to swallow but thank God, I was able to recover and enter the Lycée du Cité des Palmiers in Douala.”
With a more mature mindset, Estelle Yomba explains having discovered that her minority position was an advantage for her to exploit, in order to stand out and excel since she was still at the top. “This feeling alone redefined my way of thinking, my ambition in life and my will to succeed to prove that I was in the minority but more capable than my peers.”
Estelle Yomba completed her primary and secondary studies in Nkongsamba and at the Manengouba high school respectively. After obtaining her BAC “C” at Lycée Cité de Palmiers in Douala, she became the first student among the pioneers to be enrolled at the PK Fokam Institute of Excellence in Yaoundé to study IT in 2007. The costs of Tuition at the time was sky-high in a year when Cameroon was going through an economic crisis and a political uprising. Thanks to her intelligence, the young and determined Estelle, already fallen in love with programming, broke academic records at the PK Fokam Institute of Excellence by obtaining all the final year scholarships.
“Knowing that I was an orphan and that my tutor did not have enough resources to give me further education. I then became more aggressive in studying, consistently ranking first in my class throughout all school years and paying my tuition fees by getting scholarships. This is how I impressed supporters who enabled me to continue my studies in Ghana. And from Ghana, I went to the United States as a worker and professional ”.
Indeed, Estelle Yomba obtained a Bachelor of Science from Kwame Nkrumah ‘University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, Ghana. Estelle Yomba moved to the United States, where she was recruited, in 2012, by Skylite Communications in Silicon Valley, while she was an intern at Rack Africa in Ghana. She worked there for a year as a software engineer, before being spotted by eBay Inc. who recruited her. From 2014 to 2015, she completed her Master of Science at California State University – East Bay Grade.
“My life lesson of always being in the minority and always striving to stand out wherever I am, even in my professional career, has been my unquenchable inspiration. Over the years, I have had to get used to the situation of always being the only woman or the only black in most positions of my professional career. It was very difficult but also very interesting. Having had the opportunity to mingle with the brightest and smartest people in the world’s tech capital – Silicon Valley, via Skylight Communications, Ebay and now Senior Technical Manager at Google, my heart just keeps burning with a mission : “Help minority groups, in particular women and disadvantaged people, to have access not only to further education,but to a complementary quality education ”.
Social entrepreneur in education
It is in this context that in 2014, Estelle Yomba decided to found Sunshine Africa Education, a nonprofit organization registered in the United States with the vision to redefine the phase of quality education in Africa. Because well-ordered charity starts with oneself, and being an African, but above all a Cameroonian, Estelle Yomba and her husband Franky Yomba, who is an engineer in California, decided, in 2018, to launch Seven Group operations. by opening a world-class professional computer training institution known as the “Seven Advanced Academy”.
Seven Academy is a premier Silicon Valley IT training institute that trains young Cameroonians in high paying IT skills to enable them to land high quality jobs around the world. “My dream is to use Seven Advanced Academy to build a community of standard Silicon Valley experts first in my country, Cameroon, then in Africa. The community of first-rate Tech engineers will quickly attract the Top Multinationals to come and invest in our country, which is essentially what is lacking for the moment, ”states Estelle Yomba.
This professional center has already trained more than a hundred Cameroonians, providing them with the computer skills sought and necessary to take advantage of all the opportunities in the employment and entrepreneurship markets.
Seven Academy currently offers the following IT training programs: Web Application Development, Mobile Application Development, Digital Marketing, Project Management, and IT Security. In June 2020, Seven Advanced Academy became an accredited cybersecurity training center by EC-COUNCIL, the world’s largest information security certification body.
In addition, Estelle Yomba also launched Seven Global Procurement and Sourcing (Seven GPS), an incubation center for Seven Advanced Academy, in Cameroon. It currently has 20 senior engineers on site working either on contracts for external companies or on innovative startup launches. Seven GPS also hosts two other entities: Seven Digital Marketing Agency (Seven DMA) which manages the digital marketing and corporate communication needs of small and medium enterprises as well as large enterprises; as well as Seven Architectural Design (Seven AD) which offers solutions and specialized training in computerized architectural design.
After graduating from the academy, students of “Seven Academy” have the opportunity to upgrade to Seven GPS for 2 years of professional experience, where they can work on real industrial projects for local and international companies. Alumni of the academy are also strongly encouraged to use Seven GPS if they wish to start a business.
Seven Group is also working on Seven Group’s next big project: the creation of a state-of-the-art higher learning institute in Cameroon which will be known as Seven International University (SIU).
Objective: to change the history of digital technology in French-speaking Africa and make the university a benchmark in terms of training in computer engineering, entrepreneurship and other fields of engineering.
Source: africanshapers.com
