From a Small Spring to a Mighty River
The photo you’re looking at may seem unassuming by itself, yet it marks the beginning of something quite significant.
This is Swallowhead Spring, a spring in the medieval downlands of Wiltshire that rises behind a tree and is mostly ignored by tourists to the historical monuments it is nestled amid (Avebury, Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill).
The water that emerges from this spring builds strength and flows to create the river Kennet which, in turn, feeds into the River Thames and out towards the sea. That modest spring provides water for towns, industry, transportation, and wildlife. All from a small pool of water forming underneath a tree in the corner of a field. From modest beginnings, something truly wonderful can emerge.
Skill shortage in the IT Industry
Everyone knows that the IT industry is now struggling with a significant skills shortage. In particular, the skills required to experience the full benefit from orchestration or inventory platforms are extremely short in supply. We work with a number of technology vendors who tell us that their customers (usually tier 1 service providers) view this as a barrier to entry for the solutions that they would like to provide. We tend to concur that many of the necessary skills simply aren’t available after working with them to search the market for the past few years.
Working with a particularly innovative orchestration provider, we came to the conclusion that we could either whine about the issue or take action.
Hence, we established the Flint Academy. This Academy was designed to find people in the industry who have certain pre-requisite skills suitable for orchestration and inventory solutions and fast-track them through a training environment to deliver skilled engineers able to be deployed into live customer environments in a very short period of time.
Leveraging the Recruitment Capability
We leverage the recruitment capability we have in our staff augmentation line of business to find the candidate engineers and then pull them through a pre-defined training programme with our Learning Services line of business to create experts from the raw materials that we’re able to find.
We make sure that the engineers not only complete an academic training program but also receive regular lab-based practical training and assessments. They are also assigned senior solution architects as mentors so that they have a support network in place throughout the programme. This allows the engineers to be deployed in the field as soon as they leave the Academy. Just like the river Kennet, the Academy only has modest beginnings but the impact further downstream can be significant.
As an example, we are able to take engineers with existing skills such as:
- Programming: Python
- Data Formats: JSON, XML, HOCON, YAML
- Modelling: YANG, TOSCA
- Source Control: Git, GitLab
… and put them through a program similar to this:
- Week 0: Pre-engagement assessment in order to select a training track
- Week 1: Intro to Programmability & Programmability uses cases
- Week 2: Platform overview, Service Design and Development, Challenge lab review / Exit gate
- Week 3: RA Design and Development, Challenge lab (self-paced)
- Week 4: Workflow Management, SOO Development, Challenge lab
- Week 5: UI Customization, Policy Enforcement, Custom Solution Development, Final Certification & Exam Lab
- Week 5: Deployment
Please note that weeks 0 and 1 are included in the training plan but are not necessary for advanced students with prior expertise.
We are a group of highly skilful team of technical experts. And we are so much more.
Get in touch, we are looking forward to hearing from you!
