Tackling the digital skills drought

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The Covid-19 pandemic has seen companies around the world scrambling to embrace digital technologies, as businesses found themselves forced to adopt remote working almost overnight. Suddenly, projects that had previously been seen as too difficult or expensive became the number one priority, accelerating the pace of digital adoption by years in one fell swoop.

The problem for many businesses, though, is that there is a distinct lack of digital talent, something that was already evident before the pandemic hit. According to a study by Microsoft, 69 per cent of UK business leaders said their organisation was facing a digital skills shortage in 2020, a shortage that has only widened since.

As organisations now look to further adopt digital technologies to improve ways of working – and often revisit solutions that have accrued significant technical debt when they were thrown together in haste – a shortage of skills is being keenly felt. “It’s a real problem in terms of the opportunities that businesses or public sector organisations can’t take,” says Ash Gawthorp, Academy Services Director at IT consultancy Ten10. This has also created an inflationary effect in terms of salaries, with existing talent being snapped up by competitors who can afford to pay more.

Training people up internally brings challenges, too. “Businesses don’t necessarily have the infrastructure and architecture to support training and ongoing support themselves, and the pace of change means that you have to constantly refresh that training to keep it effective,” explains Gawthorp. “It’s also hard to assess capabilities and cultural fit, and even if you successfully bring them in and train them up – which can take a good deal of time – retention rates of entry-level tech employees are often low.”

At the same time, the use of contractors is usually prohibitive, due to the high cost and the temporary nature of assignments. “Contractors are short-term fixes. You don’t keep their knowledge inside your organisation like you do when you build a permanent workforce. You should always look for the three-to-four-year solution rather than one for six to 12 months,” says Gawthorp.

This was an issue Ten10 itself faced back in 2013, when it was struggling to source the talent it needed for its consultancy business. The solution was to set up the Ten10 Academy, which from 2013 has also sought out individuals – usually in cohorts of 25 – with the potential to work in the digital space. It then hires them and trains them up before placing them on projects with Ten10 clients. In 2016, Ten10 changed the deployment model so organisations could hire individuals permanently after these projects were completed.

To date Ten10 has taken on around 500 people from all backgrounds, including school-leavers, university graduates and career-changers, using tried and tested selection processes, including its own aptitude test framework, to determine an individual’s aptitude for tech without them having any experience in the subject.

“We don’t hire people into predetermined roles, such as software developers or business analysts,” explains Gawthorp. “We hire them to be technologists and then we put them through an initial technology training programme, which covers a little bit of everything. That allows the individuals to work out what they’re best at. After completion, they go through specialist training aligned to the roles that they have the strongest aptitude for, and also what they have enjoyed.”

There’s a strong emphasis on matching candidates with the right employer, too. “It’s about matching the personality of the individual to what the client is looking for in terms of their values and culture,” he says. “We work with charities at one end of the scale and investment banks at the other, and they require very different personality types.”

Many businesses have benefited from the Ten10 Academy, including one healthtech company who had historically been heavily dependent on contractors and looked to Ten10 to provide eight Academy Engineers. The company was so impressed with the Academy Engineers, who rapidly became integral and invaluable members of the team, that they were able to release the contractors in the first year, replacing them with Ten10’s Academy Engineers.

Ten10’s consultancy background also means it’s able to offer a hybrid solution, for instance where clients are looking to develop a new digital proposition. This can see junior staff supported by a Ten10 senior consultant, who can provide skills and expertise in the short-term. All recruits continue to have ongoing access to the consultancy network, meaning organisations can tap into the experience of senior consultants as and when needed.

Training people from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences can also help companies meet diversity and inclusivity ambitions, in areas such as gender, ethnicity, culture and social inclusion. “Most businesses are trying to build a workforce which is more representative of the country at large,” points out Gawthorp. “Take the gender balance of your team, for example. If you want to increase the number of women in your technical teams, you can’t do that by hiring people with computer science degrees because there just isn’t a great number of women taking those courses. That may change further down the line, but the digital skills emergency is here today.”

As businesses find themselves with an ever-increasing digital skills gap, the traditional approach to tech hiring is no longer viable. It’s time for companies to rethink their tech recruitment strategies and look to solutions such as Ten10’s academy model: a wealth of talented Academy Engineers, carefully selected, trained, and supported by experienced practitioners.

To find out more about how Ten10 can help your business, visit www.ten10.com

Originally published on Business Reporter