CEO Today - July 2022

THE CEO INTERVIEW www.ceotodaymagazine.com 15 our 15 years of knowledge. Not just about what good tech is, but what makes a great tech employee. We take people on a two-year journey with us that sees them coming out the end with an incredible role in tech and bundles of relevant realworld experience. We’ve developed a unique assessment process where we never have to look at someone’s CV. We assess their potential and aptitude to be good at tech. We then take them through an immersive 12week training programme that assumes zero previous coding knowledge. We then place them on-site with the 1,000+ clients we work with through our senior talent relationships and support them in the background throughout, ensuring they get the extra support and training they need to be an indispensable member of the team. We work with some incredible clients. Companies who really understand the need to invest in creating talent not just fishing from an increasingly competitive pool. Clients like Accenture, Goldman Sachs, EY, Woolworths, Deutsche Bank and many more. And the most important part is that our students are paid for this experience – rather than having to pay £50k in fees and living costs for a university course that may or may not be relevant and may or may not land them a job. This stat is hardto-believe, but despite the desperate need for tech talent, in the UK, Computer Science graduates have the highest rate of unemployment of all graduates. And in the USA, unemployment of Computer Science graduates is increasing as a percentage. Tech is something that is very practical, and very was far outstripping supply. We just couldn’t keep up with client demand. And not only did they want people, but they also wanted great people, and they wanted diverse people. Now in tech, the people didn’t exist at all. And diversity – forget it! This was a talent pool that was 85% white, 85%male and predominantly STEM degree educated. All of this combined into a perfect storm. People who could have been incredible were being shut off from future-proof careers. Companies were going backwards in their hardfought diversity goals to secure the tech skills they desperately needed, and the rest of us were forever destined to use products and websites and apps and machines that had been designed and created largely by a 15% sliver of society. And I wonder why Alexa only listens to my husband. I realised that whilst we were helping clients find great people, we weren’t creating real change. You take an incredible female developer out of one company and put her in another, you’ve helped the second company tick a box – but nothing’s advanced and nothing’s changed. You’ve just moved the problem around. The only answer was to widen the pool, increase the pool, and add diversity to the pool. So we launched _nology. Tell us more about what you do with _nology? _nology is a tech assessment and training company, with a strong focus on diversity. We’ve harnessed much about keeping up-to-date and learning on the job. It’s a hard thing to take an academic degree straight into the workplace. Conversely, 98% of our students (most of whom have no tech background at all) end up working full-time in tech. And once they convert full-time into our client at the end of the two-year training period, average tech salaries are over 40% higher than average UK earnings. What are you doing to support more women and people from different backgrounds in the world of tech, which is a predominantly male-dominated field? It all starts with the marketing. We have to reach people who don’t know they are looking for us, which is the whole point. We are careful with our use of language, removing jargon, appealing to people from different backgrounds and encouraging them to step outside their comfort zone. We don’t use CVs – previous experience doesn’t matter to us. There is so much unconscious bias that happens in the process of reading a CV. Even if you can overlook a lack of tech experience, people tend to have a view of what “good” looks like based on their own experiences. And things like team sports, captainships,

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