Building a Practical Path to Career Change: Women of Silicon Roundabout Session Roundabout
At Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019, our Client Director Nick Roberts and Senior HRBP Jennifer Hague shared how Makers has helped LexisNexis hire and train junior developers.
Jenny: Today we want to talk to you about what it means to build a culture for learning and growth and how at LexisNexis we’ve thought of ways to diversify our thinking — through bringing in people from different backgrounds. I wanted to share how we’ve managed bringing in career changes and some of the challenges we’ve dealt with.
But before we do that, I want to talk about why we thought about career changers and why that was even a thing for us.
Essentially, there are quite a few tech companies in the center of London. So trying to attract tech talent to LexisNexis is a really tough challenge, as it is for all of you, I’m sure. Thinking about different ways we could bring in talent was a top priority.
When I joined LexisNexis, there were a couple of things I really noticed. One was the majority of our existing population in software engineering wanted to be individual contributors. They loved software engineering. That’s all they ever wanted to do.
But that’s tricky for succession planning from a leadership perspective.
Another thing was that our existing team had all come from similar backgrounds. They’d always been a techie. That’s fantastic. But this didn’t necessarily create a diversity of thought.
We really wanted to bring in people who could really challenge the way that we thought and did things from a product and a technology perspective.
One of the ways that we approached this was by targeting career changes, and partnering with Makers.
Nick: At Makers we take career changes and retrain them as software developers. For the past year I’ve been working with companies such as Credit Swiss, LexisNexis, and ECS Digital, to help change their recruitment processes to be more inclusive and help them attract, hire, onboard, and train their developers.
There are typical myths that come around about being a software developer. The first one is you can only be a software developer if you’ve always been a software developer. But how many people are doing the same thing they thought they’d be doing when they left high school? I’m not — and I know most people aren’t either.
Jenny: We also found a common myth around career changes — that your technology skills were always going to be more important than maybe emotional intelligence or some of the softer skills.
For those of you that work in or with tech teams, you’ll know that with paired programming, retrospectives, feedback, everything that makes a really successful scrum team: working with people is a really, really key skill.
It’s becoming important to have those softer skills. And we found that bringing in career changes is really helped us address some of that balance.
Nick: I’m going to tell you a little story about a woman called Kate. She was a software developer back in the late nineties, decided to start a family and also started quite a successful interior construction business.
Recently she came to Makers to retrain. Before Makers, people weren’t really giving her a look in. But now she’s been able to get mid level job with Deloitte.
Jenny: There’s a myth around career changing that from an organisation perspective, it’s really hard to manage junior or inexperienced developers. I would say that’s kind of true actually.
It is tough to manage individuals who are growing their career, particularly career changers who I think have a really high expectation of you as an organisation.
They’ve retrained, they’ve probably dropped salary, they’ve potentially dropped at seniority as well.
And so they have really high expectations of you as an organisation to support them in managing their career. And so in a second I’m going to talk to you about how LexisNexis have really made sure that we’re able to support our career changers.
For now, I’m also going to tell you a little story. It’s like bedtime. So I’m talking about Freya, who is one of our career changers at LexisNexis.
Freya’s story
She had always loved technology. She really wanted to study technology but at the time she did feel that computer science was a man’s educational subject. She didn’t feel comfortable. She didn’t want to be the odd one out.
So she chose to study psychology, what she felt would be a much more, if you’d like, gender stereotypical course for her to study and felt a bit more safe.
After studying at university she went on to work in media. She did that for a number of years. Absolutely loved it, but then decided, ‘You know what, I’ve sort of plateaued my career a little bit. I’ve kind of gone as far as I can go here, and I have always really loved technology’.
So Freya did her program with Makers then joined LexisNexis in the summer and she is absolutely freaking awesome. Freya has come in, she has such a different mindset to lot of our the software engineers, she comes from media. So her ability to communicate with stakeholders is absolutely fantastic. Her ability to communicate quite challenging technical ideas is really, really good.
Like I said, we had 12 apprentices, 12 career changers that all came in at the same time to LexisNexis. We actually only have 10 scrum teams, so we have more career changers than we had teams, which was on reflection maybe a bit of a challenging situation we set ourselves up for.
We’ve got about a hundred engineers, and so one of the key ways that we made our career changers really successful is by understanding and respecting that they had experience from elsewhere. So even though they were titled With Junior Software Engineer, that they weren’t coming in sort of if you like completely green. We treated them as a respectable adult from day one.
We really wanted to make sure that they knew that we really respected and valued their previous experience.
We also spoke lots to them about what their career aspirations were using that experience as well.
We spent a lot of time with our leaders coaching and developing them and making sure they could have those career conversations with our Makers so that they felt really, really supported and that they were, they could kind of invest in themselves and we were equally as invested in them.
We’ve also had to do a little bit of managing expectations of some of our career changers. So again, because they’ve got so much experience and they have invested a lot of time and money into retraining, we’ve had to kind of talk to them about what a typical career ladder looks like for a software engineers, some of what are the opportunities, but also timescales for that.
