CompTIA’s UK Channel Community meeting in Birmingham on the 23rd and 24th June brought together the finest minds from business, academia and government to help Britain’s IT community address one of the most pressing industry issues today; how to recruit and retain talent.
The event launched with a major opening keynote speech from Rebecca Plant, Head of Apprenticeship Solutions at Capp, who previously worked at CapGemini, revealing how cross-sector collaboration is offering a new way for companies to boost their talent pool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mve-T76e8mo
Rebecca exposed the daunting challenge facing the channel, with the intertwined problems of a widely-reported skills shortage across the IT industry and UK University computing courses that produce ill-equipped graduates with the highest rate of unemployment among all disciplines.
Rebecca began by revealing how consulting, technology and outsourcing giant CapGemini UK was first prompted to look for a new way of finding and nurturing talent by the realisation that it could not compete with big-spending big-brand IT companies in a competitive graduate market.
The company decided to find an alternative ‘talent entry point’ and teamed up with a local University, Aston University, to develop the first ever sponsored UK computing degrees to be taught and delivered almost entirely in the workplace .
The partnership created two five-year work-based degrees in Software Engineering and Information Systems (which involve two years on a Higher Apprenticeship and three years studying for a BSC) and allowed students to use CapGemini Higher Apprenticeships as an entry point to complete a BSc (Hons) degree.
The partnership was mutually-beneficial as it dramatically boosted the job prospects of graduates, giving University students a vital combination of practical experience and academic study, while allowing CapGemini to proactively work with academia to grow their own talent. Critically, it ensured that the degree course content was aligned with the needs of IT employers, offering an early glimpse of how industry and academia could combine to resolve the IT skills gap.
The company was able to boost its UK talent pool by attracting and training over 300 high-quality apprentices.
Rebecca then revealed how Capp, a recruitment consultant, is helping multinationals find talent in unusual places by widening the IT talent searchlight beyond degrees and work experience with pioneering ‘strength-based assessments’. Capp helped Nestle to revolutionise its recruitment process and take the risk of finding and hiring school-leavers in paid roles, by developing a unique way to test each young person’s potential ability rather than past experience.
The key was to pinpoint eight core strengths which were critical to the company’s growth and then design online and face-to-face Strengths Tests, which included real-life scenarios, to determine the degree to which each candidate’s hidden strengths matched those of their prospective employer.
70% of all candidates were from state schools, and over half did not have a parent who had ever completed a degree, yet the reported calibre of candidates was similar to or higher than that of University graduates. The 12 who were hired are considered to have high potential to progress within the corporation. Crucially, Nestle was able to circumvent traditional qualifications to find talent from every sphere of society-with 78% of those who made it to its Assessment Centre, coming from state schools.
Overall, attendees at the Channel Community meeting got an insight into how looking beyond traditional qualifications, and investing in tailored training schemes, can help them secure the right talent for their business. At subsequent breakout sessions on everything from ‘the Benefits of a Diverse Workplace’ to ‘Connecting Companies with Industry Skills & Resources’ attendees brought together representatives of Government and industry with SMEs from across the UK to discuss collaborative solutions to their recruitment and retention problems.
Mark Heholt from the Government’s Tech Partnership and Colin Biddulph, National Account Manager for the Government’s National Apprenticeship Service told attendees how the UK Government is helping to reduce the risk of hiring apprentices and training staff by funding 50% of the cost of providing IT training for employees.
CompTIA’s VP Skills Certifications Graham Hunter explained how CompTIA will help provide SMEs with a crucial barometer of the quality of nearby training providers by creating a directory of local CompTIA-accredited Authorised Partners that produce apprentices with a broad foundation of skills and vendor-neutral qualifications.
Throughout the day, these innovations in recruitment and development showed how collaborative efforts between companies big and small, and between industry, academia and government are helping to quietly transform the technology workforce and society.
Learn more at our Best of UK Channel Community webinar on 29 July at 4pm UK (GMT+1).
Register here
To register for CompTIA’s EMEA event in central London in October, visit: https://www.comptia.org/events/view/comptia-emea-member-partner-conference2015
