One of the big missions for us as Software Cornwall is helping our members recruit. The Technology industry struggles to recruit Software developers. Especially down here in Cornwall, with much of the talent leaving the county.
We offer several ways around this big issue, thanks to the help and support of our membership base.
Mission to Mars
Mission to Mars is an award-winning week-long workshop that caters to two main audiences. First, is the up-and-coming talent within the tech scene here in Cornwall. Second, a great team-building exercise for the professionals.
It started as a work experience week for schools where students learnt about Test-Driven Development, Agile, Story testing, coding and Mob Programming in teams.
What we learnt is that it’s a really good way to engage them and we’ve produced several examples of talent going into Cornish tech businesses as a result of the program.
We created a smaller, condensed M2M and called it Bitesize. This 1-2 day mission we use for professionals, who use it as a recruitment/testing tool and for team-building activities.
This program has led multiple students to join the technology sector and some probably are working in your businesses already.
Jobs Board and CV Bank
Our second way to help recruit talent is our Jobs Board and CV bank.
We advertise these vacancies weekly over our social media channels and offer support where possible.
They are also hosted on the Jobs board on our website. You can find them in the brand new ‘Cornish Tech Jobs’ newsletter too. This goes out every fortnightly directly to the inboxes.
The CV bank is for people who can’t find a job role that suits them now. They send in the CV to our website and add it to the bank with other candidates. Then, businesses can look at them and can offer further steps or create a tailored made role.
Gateway Into Tech
The third way we help to recruit new talent is through our new Gateway into Tech program. This is all about finding people with job skills and experience already, and assisting them with materials, lessons and guidance in transitioning those talents into a Tech environment.
We give them learning resources and some time to read through and learn before each candidate is given an initial assessment to see their suitability to move forward. They may need a little more time to adjust to the fundamentals.
From there they continue to learn until they can attend a Mission to Mars bitesize event where employers can assess the skills they have learned. After they network, the Employer may see something in them – which leads to an interview and possible job opportunity.
In addition to this, we will be using the Digital badge accreditation scheme Credly Acclaim.
Digital badges are a digital award – a scout badge for your social media. It’ll show you what skills you have, what you’ve achieved and who is willing to say you have achieved it. These badges are tiered by the challenge of the task and start with Participating in an activity, leading to showing Leadership.
You can recognise any skill, and the most important thing is having businesses associate themselves with that badge as a letter of recommendation. This means our members can assist us with creating a “curriculum” of sorts, which has all the necessary skills they are looking for.
By associating themselves with the Digital Badges in Cornwall, it demonstrates there is a large network and community that want to grow, and it encourages people to move to the area as they know there will be employment opportunities to grow.
Training Club
Since January, we’ve been piloting a training club with Bluefruit Software, one of our many members. They have been looking at upskilling their staff in-house but were struggling with the admin, as well as finding engaging ways to do so. They approached us and together came up with a bespoke package of training.
We’ve run two-quarters of weekly remote training and using our network, found world-class trainers to deliver topics both technical or just behavioural, such as design thinking when it comes to projects.
The training is not focused solely on development staff, it’s topic-driven and able to be accessed by anyone in your team. If you feel you need something covered, such as being more agile, creating sales pipelines, or covering a comprehensive social media strategy – we can cover that.
Why the long backstory, why does this matter to us? We want to open it up to the rest of our members. We have created a training program of weekly sessions that will be curated by a membership cohort.
You choose what you want us to cover, and we’ll add it to the list! We know training is expensive, through this method it can be done for a fraction of the cost.
Your teams will feel that they are getting real value and will progress. Employers will see greater returns, new skills starting to develop amongst your staff and hopefully higher staff retainment.
This will be available for all Software Cornwall members. The more companies that get involved, the lower the price can be.
Topics covered in the past include Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, Agile thinking, Kubernetes and much, much more. The more involvement we have from the community who will find it interesting, the better!