'The Accelerator' - Closing the Digital Skills Gap

Things have been a bit strange recently haven’t they?  

In times like this it can often be good to take stock of everything and to do a bit of reflecting. I joined THG towards the end of 2019 and it’s been a whirlwind, so I’ve taken a bit of time to think about everything that’s gone on in the last few months and how Talent Acquisition works in one of the fastest moving companies out there. Turns out there’s a lot to think about so I won’t bore you with all of it. What I did want to do was reflect on one of the most impressive (in my humble opinion) aspects of what we do as a business to make sure we can keep up with the demands of a skill short tech talent market; our ‘Accelerator’ programme.  

Having spent a few years now in tech recruitment, a recurring theme throughout all that time is the ‘digital skills gap’ and what companies are doing to overcome it. There is an ever-changing digital world creating new jobs and challenges, and not enough people fill those jobs and meet those challenges. From a tech talent acquisition point of view, it’s a real fight for the talent out there which already exists. THG is headquartered in Manchester, as are so many other great tech companies and so when we are looking for our next great Java Developer/SRE/Front End Developer (the list goes on) they are too. Luckily (being modest?), we do quite well as a Talent Acquisition team at bringing in top class talent to THG but what is clear is that there isn’t necessarily enough of it to go around.  We then face the same question as all those other companies out there; what can we do differently to make sure we stay ahead of the game and meet the demand for talent?  

The Accelerator programme is a great answer to this.  

THG has a proud reputation of believing in the graduate market and much of our success so far has been as a result of bringing in the best and brightest graduates and letting them loose to play a huge part in driving what we do. In tech, we forecast 120+ graduates to join us in 2020 (alongside senior hires, you can probably now guess why I've not had time to reflect until now...). These graduates generally come from the top Universities running the best Computer Science courses. As you can imagine, the fight for this talent is also a tough one. This is where the Accelerator programme gives us an edge.  

In short, the Accelerator programme has been designed to create our own talent from scratch.  We take graduates from courses that wouldn’t normally lead on to a job in technology but who have transferrable skills. We then put them through a rigorous 6-month training course which turns them in to Software Engineers. Following the 6-month course, they then ‘graduate’ and we integrate them into our tech teams around the business. It’s magical. We are creating talent, that just six months ago didn’t exist, to plug the digital skills gap.  

Our tech talent team sat down (virtually) with the brains behind the Accelerator, our Directors of R&D Phil Wilson (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/philip-wilson-64374b/) and James Mercer (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/james-mercer-20a4194/) as well as our Graduate Programme Manager, Steph Wright to discuss all things Accelerator. What follows are some of the most pertinent parts of that conversation that will hopefully give you an insight in the world of the Accelerator programme.  

How did the Accelerator begin? 

It’s always good to start at the beginning and Phil was happy to let us know the story. The seed of an idea around a ‘THG Academic Institute’ was sewn a couple of years ago now. There was an idea that THG wanted to create something in the academic/educational space that could add value to both THG and the wider community. A range of ideas around what that could look like and the best way to get it up and running were wrestled with. In the end, a few of THG’s brightest minds put together a teaching programme. 

As Phil put it; “What it boiled down to was, we can hire some recent grads who have, let's say, some strong analytics skills, they’re good thinkers, and maybe have strong soft-skills, they’re ambitious, they see the big picture so maybe some skills that we don’t quite get out of the Computer Science cohort so well” He continued “In the course of their work they will have discovered computing and found that they find it interesting. It’s typical if you do Physics or Maths you work with some computer simulations or computer tools and some people get the bug and others don’t” 

This seemed a good place to start when looking for people to fill the course and so that put the focus on STEM grads (Mathematicians, Physicists, Engineers etc). What the course was designed to give them was 6 months of “learning to programme plus as much computer science as we could squeeze in, plus some software engineering”. 

But what did we want out of it? James gives an insight in to that. Whilst there is a wider aim of community outreach and research, “the biggest thing we wanted was to turn out high quality developers” and it’s easy to see why when you understand that fight for talent. 

From there, the Accelerator programme was born. THG took 25 grads from a range of academic backgrounds, designed course material and set about creating tech talent.  

How are they performing/what are the results? 

It’s all well and good getting a course up and running, but the proof had to be in the pudding. The result needed to be that we had work ready Software Engineers who could make an impact in their allotted teams within the company. So, was that the case? 

When discussing last year's cohort, Phil was pleased to report that they are “performing very well, close to parity with regular computer science grads” 

He continued “We’ve had a round of performance reviews where we have looked at how accelerators are doing in comparison to regular grads and a lot of the feedback was they don’t know quite as much computer science but boy do they work hard and they get the big picture and they want to be a part of the action.” 

What became clear in this conversation is that not only had we created a batch of 25 technically proficient engineers, there was an added by-product of introducing a diverse range of personalities into our teams' culture.  

James summed this up in saying “They have a broad range of skills that you don’t find typical of computer science majors.” If you’re wondering why James refers to them as ‘majors’, he’s American. “The people we have on this course are very bright, multi-disciplinary, and engaged with the business direction; it’s a subtle win for what we’re doing to be able to pull these people into our environment.” 

Demographics 

The idea of pulling in people from different backgrounds in an important one. Diversityintech.co.uk sums it up pretty well when they say “Implementing diversity in your business is a critical step for growth. There is enough evidence that shows having a diverse company leads to greater creativity and success.” 

This notion formed a good portion of our conversation. Aside from introducing different personality traits within the team, it seemed the Accelerator programme has started to make inroads into making our tech team a more diverse one. Something that James proudly pointed out when he said, “It’s been over a third women on the Accelerator which compares to roughly 16% in general in tech so we’re doing fairly well there.” 

Phil chipped in that “for some reason a lot of women study maths and for some reason seem a lot warmer towards doing computer programming as 22-year-old than they are as 15-year olds”. It’s not unfair to say that when you're coming to the end of your schooling and you’re deciding which way you want to go next; your decisions probably aren’t the most informed. By creating a new pathway to get into tech at a later age, it would seem we can pick up a more diverse population of people that otherwise would have been lost to the industry.  

There are also discussions around improving this aspect further, highlighted by James “We now wouldn’t mind seeing people from an even broader background. It’s about people with the drive, interest and ability to solve problems analytically. They don’t necessarily have to know calculus or 8-dimensional geometry or anything like that to be able to get through this. I’ve known English majors and Music majors who have made excellent software developers so we wouldn’t mind seeing people from an even broader background.” 

Challenge on for the Talent Acquisition team!  

What’s the reaction been amongst the university population? 

We can sit here as an internal team and wax lyrical about the Accelerator, but it’s important to understand what the reaction has been of the people we are looking to connect with.  

Our Graduate Talent Programme Manager, Steph, gave us an insight into this. “The universities love the programme because there’s nothing else out there like it... it gives graduates a gateway into tech as well as 6-months of training and a competitive salary. They know that the digital skills gap brings huge challenges to companies like THG, but they love the fact that we’re trying to tackle the problem ourselves. It also reinforces to their students that their degrees are transferrable and that they can go down a few different career paths.”  

The idea that we are offering a new, different pathway coupled with the fact that our Accelerator graduates get paid during their six month course really does create an exciting proposition, summed up nicely by Steph when she said, “some of the Accelerator grads from this year's cohort have told me that they can’t believe how lucky they are that they found it”. 

Where next? 

Overall, it seems that we are onto something pretty good with the Accelerator. What is exciting though is that there is so much further we can take it. So, what are some of the ideas about where we can go next? 

Phil outlined some of his thoughts on this. “One approach could be to fan out and have more specialisations, to have more rigorous front-end skills or back-end databases or devops-y things or looking at our skills gap internally and what we want to fill in.” 

It’s fair to say the course has been designed to create software engineers that can fit in to one of our many engineering teams. However, due to the nature of what we do our tech team is made up of a variety of technical skill sets and there is a wider skill shortage across all areas! The more talent we can create across more tech stacks/disciplines, the more we successfully plug that skills gap.  

Phil gave some other ideas about what else could be done. “Another approach would be to expand the demographic. Go after early school leavers or people in their early 20s who decided I don’t want to work in a restaurant anymore for example. There are all sorts of possibilities there” 

This one, in my opinion, is particularly exciting. For my sins, I used to be a PE teacher before making the obvious transition into recruitment....  and a big thing in the sporting arena is talent ID. Finding hidden talent in places where people weren’t previously looking, then providing those people with a pathway to sporting greatness. The same can apply to tech. I would guess there is a lot of untapped potential out there in demographics that just didn’t have the knowledge of and/or access to a career in tech and so the possibility of unearthing that talent is an exciting one that could have a huge impact on THG both technically and culturally.  

A further potential offering was around what can be done to up-skill the current workforce. Digital Skills Global say that potentially the most pressing factor when it comes to the digital skills gap is the lack of digital skills within the current work force. In-house training therefore becomes essential. “One angle we have spoken about is whether we should do more internally focussed training, brush up your internal skills. That could be you’re a search engineer marketer and you want to learn how to automate stuff, we’ll show you”. In doing this the Accelerator programme could take on the digital skills gap from all angles. Not only are we creating tech talent from scratch, we would be up-skilling our existing work force to optimise their performance.  

There you have it... 

Hopefully, this article has given you an insight in to why I think the Accelerator programme is a real point of difference for us. We have already seen great success in creating talent, increasing diversity and improving team culture and there is so much potential to take things further.  

If you want to learn more about the accelerator or what we have going on at THG in general feel free to drop me a message.