The growing skills gap in tech is becoming expensive: according to the CBI, two-thirds of firms can’t fill digital roles which is costing businesses around £4.4 billion each year.
One way to solve this skills gap is training up young people and WhiteHat thinks it has the key.
The start-up, established by former bankers Euan Blair and Sophie Adelman, is on a mission to create an alternative to university, mainly through apprenticeships. The organisation focuses on placing school-leavers in roles for the likes of Facebook, Improbable and Treatwell.
However, WhiteHat realised there was a gap in the market in providing training for young people ahead of their apprenticeships, to ensure they had the necessary skills that would allow them to seek full-time employment. That’s how a new programme named Tech Talent Accelerator in collaboration with Generation UK was created.
Set to launch next month, 100 young Londoners from disadvantaged backgrounds will be taken through a six-week free coding programme to teach them the basics when it comes to software engineering and data science. On completion of the course, Adelman hopes many of the students will go on to WhiteHat apprentices with the likes of Facebook and Morgan Stanley signed up to employ the graduates.
“We realised that for many young people who look at companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, they think, ‘Gosh, I have no idea how I would ever work for those companies,” says Adelman. “There’s a massive barrier for those young people to develop the skills to get into those careers. We thought this would be the way to level the playing field and get more diverse young people into these career paths.”
The equivalent coding course would cost around £5,000 per person, but the Tech Talent Accelerator is funded by BlackRock Charitable Trust, the philanthropic arm of the global investment corporation, so it is completely free.
Over the next two years, four cohorts of 25 people aged between 18-24 will learn technical skills as well as something Generation UK refers to as “growth mindset” skills. “We need to build upon the students’ awareness and eagerness to learn because in the tech sector that’s an absolute requirement. As well as training technical skills, we major heavily on developing the mindsets and behaviours that we know will be critical for on-going success,” explains Generation UK CEO Michael Houlihan.
Ensuring there is a diverse range of students is a particular focus for the programme. Already, 65 per cent of apprentices placed by WhiteHat come from minority ethnic backgrounds and 50 per cent have claimed free school meals. The two organisations are aiming to target people in areas of the city with high rates of unemployment, such as Newham, Barking and Dagenham, have experienced time in local authority care, have or have had a refugee status or have dependents or caring responsibilities.
“These are really transformative job opportunities for people to move out of unemployment or zero-hours contracts into jobs where they’re earning £20,000+ and can have a realistic hope to double that over the next five years,” says Houlihan.
In addition, companies are crying out for diverse talent, says Adelman. “Diversity is essential to many companies now and bringing in diverse talent is a key objective for them. There are supply and demand dynamics at play.”
Towards the end of the six weeks, the students will also receive career advice, interview prep and help to connect with mentors in order to support them with securing full-time roles. “We don’t expect all the young people who go through this programme to get an apprenticeship or a job but we are going to be looking at positive destinations for all people,” adds Adelman.
If these first pilot groups go well, WhiteHat and Generation UK both hope it will lead to more cohorts and training programmes. “100 people is scratching the surface of the possibility. When you look at the number of software engineering vacancies that there are nationally, or even just in London, it’s in the tens of thousands,” says Houlihan. “We would like programmes like this to become a reasonable contributor to [ending] those vacancies.”
To apply for the Tech Talent Accelerator programme, potential participants can visit the Generation UK website to find out more
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