Hiring junior tech people doesn’t need to be risky business
Many tech teams have experienced a lot of churn with people over the last few years, and even in normal times it’s common for parts of your experienced workforce to leave or retire. The natural option is to replace like for like, with similarly experienced people who can add value quickly. Finding these people is a challenge, with (66%) of large UK businesses saying they struggle to recruit employees with the skills they need (source: Skills Gap Statistics UK 2023 | Oxford Learning College) While this may cover a variety of roles, the demand for technical people in organisations remains higher than the supply.
The option of replacing experienced leavers with junior people entering the tech workforce for the first time might seem like it’s fraught with risk, effort and time. Tech leaders may question using junior people, asking how quickly they can add value, what the overheads are and how they will continue to learn without taking time away from other people. Although hiring junior people may take some additional effort and time, this is likely going to be much less than you think, especially if you use the right service provider who understands these challenges.
What are the challenges?
Ensuring people have the right skills to meet your needs
People not being able to add value quickly
Increased overheads of providing additional support
Meeting requirements for ongoing learning
Risk of people not working out or not wanting a long term career in tech
How can a technology academy address these challenges?
Skills and competencies: Corecom Technology Academy works with clients to understand the skills and competencies that are important to your team’s delivery, helping us to provide the right training to ensure people a fundamental understanding of delivering software in teams and to ensure they are conversant in the tools and technology you use. We can also provide a more strategic skills and people assessment, working with you to understand and plan your talent pipelines in order to meet your technology roadmap.
Sharing our experience: It’s true that people entering the tech workforce might not be able to add as much value and as quickly as experienced people, but realistically how long does it take for an experienced hire versus a junior consultant or similar? Typically it might take a few weeks for an experienced hire to get up to speed as they work out how systems work, the way projects run, and who the right people to talk to are. For a junior person who has the right base knowledge and is eager to learn, they’re going to have similar questions and things to learn - the things that are specific to what you do, that anyone would need to find out. They’re going to take a bit longer to navigate things, and with the right support, will often get there in a few months or less. Often they’ll be starting to work independently with support in a couple of months.
Entering the workforce: When people enter the workforce for the first time they often need a little bit more support than other people. This might be in the form of additional feedback and mentoring or to answer the many questions they might have. CTA assists in this through our network of experienced consultants who are available to answer questions and provide their many years of experience. We can help them with:
additional informal training
understanding how things work in your teams
providing tips and guidance
the collation and provision of feedback to people.
Training, technical support and learning opportunities: In the initial months of a person’s career in tech they may need additional training and opportunities to learn. This may be the result of a specific need to meet project delivery requirements, or as part of the person’s longer term learning objectives. Providing people with the opportunity to learn from peers and more experienced people alike, within your teams and outside your organisation can be an extremely valuable way of helping progress quickly. CTA provides ongoing technical support through our trainers and experienced consultants, as well as a range of learning opportunities from additional formal training to communities of practice and lots more.
When someone enters the tech world for the first time they ultimately don’t know if it’s for them, but through a rigorous recruitment process and a significant investment in initial training on their part, it’s highly unlikely that people change their mind so quickly and easily. Sometimes a specific person might not be right for your team, but in reality this is no different to hiring an experienced person. People entering the tech industry are arguably more eager and enthusiastic to learn and progress in the first few years of their career, so if you have the opportunities and support in place, it can be the perfect mix.
Can CTA help your organisation?
CTA are an inclusive and diverse technology academy for passionate people looking to start and progress their careers in Software Engineering, Business Analysis, Quality Engineering/Testing, Cloud & DevOps, Data Engineering and more. We help our clients build diverse pipelines of talent by recruiting, training, and integrating our Associate Consultants into their teams.