Becs Roycroft, Senior Director of Global Emerging Talent Operations & Reskill, mthree
Businesses continue to struggle to hire the talent they need. In fact, one of the greatest challenges that leaders face is to find candidates with the right skills – the skills gap. Many factors contribute to the skills gap, including the pace of technological change, and the pressure to innovate and maintain legacy applications and processes, all of which make hiring challenging.
There are numerous options for an organisation to hire staff, such as using in-house HR teams, external job boards or standard recruitment agencies. But they can end up being costly. A bad hire doesn’t just cost time spent on interviews, but also – and worse still – could hurt a business financially and reputationally, and destroy morale.
Another option is for an organisation to strategically build its own talent pool of people trained in the specific skills needed. This takes a little longer to initiate but will pay off in the medium and long term, with a workforce built with the future in mind, not just to fill current gaps.
There are two ways an organisation can build a talent pool:
• Reskilling its own workforce
• Through an emerging talent strategy
Reskilling is about unleashing the talent within an organisation. Taking its own non-tech employees and reskilling them into tech roles, for example, retains a company’s organisational knowledge, business acumen and culture and brings a diverse mindset to the IT function.
Hiring emerging talent (graduates and early career shifters), by our definition, is fundamentally different from the traditional job market. Our emerging talent are pre-trained in the tech and skillsets a business requires. The business doesn’t have to cover the further expense of training and nurturing an employee from day one.
According to the Future of Jobs Report, 75 million jobs in 20 major economies are expected to be displaced by 2022. At the same time, technological advances and new ways of working could also create 133 million new roles. But even if businesses managed to reskill all 75 million people into new roles, that still leaves a skills gap of 58 million unfilled positions.
Organisations will need to look at their whole workforce strategy and how each element complements the others in order to produce a future-proof, engaged and loyal team that closes the tech skills gap for their business. There needs to be shift in the way organisations plan their workforce strategy. It has to be a combination of reskilling their own employees in areas where jobs are being lost and moving them in to tech roles, as well as looking to the future workforce in the shape of new graduates – the emerging talent.
As an emerging talent and training business, at mthree, we can help organisations do both, from hiring STEM graduates with huge potential, training them in the technology stack an organisation needs, and embedding them into their teams across the globe to reskilling an organisation’s own employees in Java, GoLang, Python and Data Science.
2020 has seen huge change across the globe and has highlighted inequality across the workplace with so many groups underrepresented – especially in technology. Business need to look at their hiring practices and create strategies for tackling these issues.
mthree is pledging to cover the cost of training 1,000 people from underrepresented groups through its Aspire 1,000 programme, helping them to find a career in technology. Through its bootcamp business, mthree, in association with The Software Guild, will deliver world class training for free, to help candidates land their dream role in tech.
We are looking for organisations who believe in driving equality and inclusion to join us, pledge roles to underrepresented groups, and close the skills gap for our clients – and the Aspire 1,000 programme is just the beginning.
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For more information, visit www.mthree.com