How to find, train, and retain highly technical employees

UST is a global provider of digital technology and transformation, information technology and services. For more than 23 years, UST has worked with the world's best companies to make a real impact through transformation. With deep domain expertise and a future-proof philosophy, we embed innovation and agility into our clients' organizations – delivering measurable value and lasting change across industries and worldwide. Together, with over 30,000 employees in 30+ countries, we build for boundless impact – touching billions of lives in the process.

The challenge

Organisations and IT leaders are under pressure to deliver new digital solutions faster than ever. This, along with a shortage of IT development skills in the market, led to the evolution of a new concept called “Citizen Development” that leverages low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms. Additionally, sufficient business analysis skills, which create a bridge between business users and IT departments, have emerged as a gap.

Cyberattacks on enterprises are increasingly sophisticated, which has compelled enterprises to focus on their security posture and establish adequate security and vulnerability controls.

With organizations adopting data-driven models to streamline their business, there is now a significant focus on Data Science, Big Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. Ensuring that employees have the knowledge to understand and support these technologies is paramount.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact too. Our initial challenge was getting access to a talent base, which we overcame by leveraging partnerships with local authorities and universities. The pandemic delayed the start and completion of training. Though we could do most of the training remotely, on-the-job training and mentoring required an element of face-to-face interactions that we overcame by leveraging communication tools and our experience in managing the remote deployment of our workforce.

The goal

Our goal was to build a model to help us engage with a new workforce and provide a clear route to employment with UST. For this purpose, we wanted to build a model similar to our very successful UST Step IT UP skills training program, a unique apprenticeship program that recruits and trains a new generation of technical talent for businesses poised for digital transformation. Whereas the Step IT Up program is designed to find and train talent for our current and future clients, this model is tailored to ensure that UST itself can find, train, and retain diverse, highly technical employees in the UK.

The importance of partnerships and collaboration

The pandemic accelerated the rate of digitisation on a global scale, with industry data indicating that two years’ worth of transformation occurred in just two months. Because this has exacerbated gaps in digital skills, upskilling and training are key to addressing the talent gap.

UST designed a program based on a three-pronged approach to meet our objective of having locally sourced and trained talent available to address the talent gaps we evidenced before it could affect our ability to function:

1. Identify the core talent base we want to invest in. This includes new university graduates, women who have had a career break and are interested in technology upskilling, and associates from various apprenticeship programs and digital skills bootcamps.
2. Partner with universities and training providers who can help customise training programs to suit our requirements. For example, UST partnered with Coventry University and York University training several postgraduate students for a data science project to provide a professional experience while allowing them to continue their academic studies.
3. Partner with local authorities to provide an environment that fosters success and provides opportunities to scale up the model. As an example, our partnership with the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) gave us access to many training providers and a talent base of associates, enabling us to boost recruitment in the West Midlands region and allow local residents to play a role in the UK’s thriving tech industry. The WMCA runs digital bootcamps for adults who are unemployed or in low-paid jobs and those with no or little experience in tech. Its goal is to place 70% of the participants into positions upon bootcamp completion.

The outcome

We now have an established model to source and develop a talent pool of candidates in the local market. This has significantly increased the number of job opportunities we can create and, thereby new market solutions we can launch with the help of highly trained, technical talent.

1. It also helped us enhance our diversity and inclusion efforts. It was important to us that all of the onboarded talent from this program have diverse gender, geographic and ethnic backgrounds
2. We got an additional 15% throughput – a measure of how many units of information a system can process in a given amount of time – on new products and services with the help of the new talent base we trained and ultimately hired
3. We were also able to expedite our digital transformation services for three financial services customers and two retail customers in the UK by leveraging these upskilled employees.

Reflecting back and looking forward

Looking back, we probably could have had a more significant role in shaping the bespoke training for the associates and partnering with academia to get some of the skill requirements upfront in the course. This is an area of focus as we move forward with regular and ongoing improvements and the development of best practices.

Some advice for other businesses

Training programs initiated by local authorities on digital skills bootcamps are well structured for enterprises. We recommend companies leverage these programs and work with local authorities to tap into the training on offer.