UK talent solutions firm TechTalent plans to open offices in Luxembourg in 2023 and wants to create an AI lab there. Its director of strategy and partnerships spoke to Silicon Luxembourg.
When Tukeer Hussain was first invited by the UK embassy to visit Luxembourg, he was surprised to witness a protest by teachers outside parliament. “It was one of the tamest protests I’ve ever seen in my life,” he smiles. The demonstrators were drawing attention to teacher internships, created to plug the nationwide teacher shortage by fast-tracking teachers into the post. “But those ‘interns’ had a lower salary than their peers who had studied at university,” he explained.
Equity issues aside, Hussain drew parallels with his employer, TechTalent, which seeks to bridge the technology skills gap through government and corporate bootcamps aimed at people wishing to switch to a technology-focused career. “The conversation I saw in front of me that time, will be the conversation that’s going to be held about technology in about 5 or 10 years,” he said.
Global talent shortage
Given the global talent shortage, fast-tracking talent through upskilling is the most sustainable solution for tech employers. Luxembourg already backs a number of similar initiatives, including the Ecole 42 tech school, expected to launch in the autumn.
UK talent solutions and upskilling edutech firm Tech Talent seeks to complement these efforts and contribute to making technology teams more inclusive, when it opens an office in Luxembourg.
“If you’re here in the company and sales team and you want to go over here from a tech role, it analyses the quickest way to get there.”
Tukeer Hussain, TechTalent’s strategy & partnerships director
Diversity
The firm specialises in onboarding under-represented learners onto its government-backed and corporate hybrid technology programmes, including people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds (according to the firm, 72% of its alumni identify as Black, Asian, or mixed ethnic heritage), LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse.
“We do a bit of cultural training as well with managers about how to work with neurodiversity because the reality is that they are not going to go away,” says Hussain, adding: “If someone has the capabilities to make a living and all that it takes is for people around them to slightly adjust the way they operate or give tasks, that’s something we want to contribute towards. We think that tech is a brilliant way of doing this because if you need to remove yourself from a situation you can work from home and do the task in your own time.”
Gender Representation
Women, who make up 47% of the TechTalent Academy’s over 4,000 trainees, remain important for the founder, Janice Rae. Having been the only woman in a classroom of young programming students in Glasgow in 1987, she is driven by the fact that little has changed in terms of gender inclusion in technology.
The startup has attracted women candidates to its courses through a targeted marketing approach on social media and by forming partnerships. Among the latter is one with a women’s shelter in the West Midlands. “These are a group of powerful women who’ve been able to deal with very difficult circumstances in their personal life, and have been able to move on from it. And now crucially they need to set something up in their lives and are willing to put in the effort, the time and the consideration and are intellectually capable,” said Hussain.
Corporate Upskilling
When it comes to upskilling for corporate customers, TechTalent encourages employers to cast their nets outside of existing tech teams. The strategy and partnerships director recalled one corporate company that trained administration and sales staff to become penetration testers.
“People looked at us thinking ‘That’s mad! Why would you give such an important role and training to someone who doesn’t work in that field? […] The answer is they really wanted to get promoted or make a move into the technical part of their organisation. They were willing to work as hard as they possibly could during the training period, along with their existing work in the evenings or on the weekends to be able to deliver.”
TechTalent’s course specialisations are broad. By far the most popular so far has been the cyber security training. And its alumni have gone on to pursue careers as anything from data scientists, cyber security analysts, and software developers.
“If you’re here in the company and sales team and you want to go over here from a tech role, it analyses the quickest way to get there.”
Tukeer Hussain, TechTalent’s strategy & partnerships director
AI Lab
The firm’s Luxembourg office will serve as an EU hub for its activities on the continent and, it hopes, the home of a lab to develop the AI product “Unbiased Hire”. The tool focuses on getting neurodiverse and under-represented people into the workforce and retaining them.
“It also doubles up as a skills transfer metric where if you’re here in the company and sales team and you want to go over here from a tech role, it analyses the quickest way to get there,” says Hussain. The mid-term goal is to train machine learning to do the same for all roles and broaden its scope to an entire sector.
