A new approach to diverse recruitment

Annonuncer:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to the XTech podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m the CEO at the Tech Talent Charter, and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

Now today, I am delighted to be joined by Anna Brailsford, CEO at Code First Girls. Hi, Anna.

Anna Brailsford:
Hello, Debbie. How are you doing?

Debbie Forster MBE:
I’m good. I’ve really been looking forward to this chat because you and I’ve known each other for a while. So I was going to try and keep us to a form of getting this right, but you and I know that we could talk until the cows come home. We’ll try and land on time this time.

So now one of the things I was interested to find out because although I’ve known you for years, I wasn’t aware of this. We try and figure out how people get into tech. We find some people like me take a turn and suddenly find themselves there. Other people are born with a laptop in their hand. What about you? How did you get into tech?

Anna Brailsford:
So I’ve been in EdTech for about 10 years now, but actually originally I’m a career switcher, and incidentally that’s why I believe so much in career switches. So a large part of what Code First Girls does now is helping career switchers come out of their existing profession and enter into something new.

So I was actually educated as a barrister originally, a criminal barrister. I decided that technology and being in business and being an entrepreneur was something that was super, super important to me. So I did career switch.

But yeah, over the last 10 years, I’ve helped to build EdTech companies essentially, EdTech companies that became unicorns, but also smaller EdTech companies as well and helping them with their investment piece and their go-to-market strategy as they’ve grown.

So it wasn’t a simple transition into technology, it took many twists and turns because I don’t believe fundamentally life is perfect. I believe actually it can only be perfect with the benefit of hindsight, and I think that’s the beauty of career switches and taking different turns in your journey.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I mean, you and I are seeing a lot of companies, tech’s starting to wake up to the richness of that because we bring so much learning, wider learning. If you think about the really different kinds of jobs that you did, particularly those startups, scale up unicorn, the dream, what did it teach you?

Anna Brailsford:
What did it teach me? It taught me just how important it is actually, I think to stay true to the founder’s vision. There’s this fantastic book, and I’d encourage anybody listening to this that’s interested in entrepreneurship or indeed interested in how their own company is growing if they belong to a larger organization to read the book Founder’s Mentality.

Because what that represents is that really when companies go wrong and when things go wrong, it doesn’t really matter your stage of growth, whether you’ve got to the point where like ourselves we’ve secured Series A funding, or whether you’re a big corporation on a real growth trajectory, what this book does is it marks out all the data points, all the danger zones for companies on either trajectory. And what it demonstrates is that the way you get back from the danger zone is actually bringing things back to what made that company successful in the first place.

And frequently that is bottling and going back to what the founder did, what the founder put into place and what made the company meaningful. What gave it meaning? Before the constant focus on profit and potentially bloating of management, what made the company and the company mission resonate with the individuals that actually bought the product to begin with?

Debbie Forster MBE:
And that’s true, I think that happens at any sized company. But I’ve also seen people use that to really bring a project, a product back to those core principles because it is, as you say, it’s so easy to get caught up in that wider and wider focus, putting on more and more bloat for management, but also losing that focus and focusing on being busy, not necessarily on delivering, that bravery to step back, to strip back, because that’s a painful process, isn’t it, about stopping things, ending things? Stripping those things back are really, really important.
Well, okay, so then you found yourself, you went for the challenge of leading Code First Girls. Now I’ve known Code First Girls before I knew you, but not everybody … I knew it when it was a little, tiny whippersnapper of an organization, but some of the listeners won’t necessarily know who they are or what they do. So give me that pitch. What is Code First Girls?

Anna Brailsford:
So Code First Girls now, in terms of the pitch now, are actually one of the largest communities of women coders in the world. And very simply, we provide women with free education in order to take jobs as software developers, data scientists, product managers. There’s a whole plethora of different roles that we can help to fill.

And essentially it’s a B2B subscription model. So we work with about 130 different companies. They subscribe to Code First Girls. We guarantee to fill their hardest-to-fill roles typically from a female representation perspective, whilst ensuring we take their money and we reinvest that back in local communities simultaneously to build up that talent pool and also their employer brand at the same time.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. Now, this has been an organization that’s been around for years and it’s gone from tiny, feisty little startup to beginning to scale. When you came in, you have really taken it to the next level. What’s been the key to that success of taking it to the next level?

Anna Brailsford:
So when I joined Code First Girls, I think it’s safe to say that it was an educational campaign. It was a campaign to teach as many women how to code as possible. My background, I’d come from LinkedIn Learning, a lot of data had gone into that type of role. So to give you an idea of what I did previously and then how it fed into Code First Girls.

So I used to be commercial director of Lynda.com. Lynda.com at that time was one of the largest skills platforms in the US. It had a really amazing pedigree actually when it came to technology education, but also education for creatives, the creative industry. So it was a big early play in relation to the likes of Apple, Adobe, these types of technologies.

And when it was bought by LinkedIn, at the time I was like, “They’ve just acquired a really cool learning platform.” But actually when you looked at the backend of what they were doing, LinkedIn plots six data points about every individual that logs onto their platform. They’ll plot you as an individual, where you went to university, your job, and a couple of data points that they needed to shore up with things like, okay, what are your skills and what are the knowledge that’s required to get your next best job or to promote an individual or to attract an individual to your organization?

So what I started to realize is that actually the data play is incredibly important, but also in my view, in order to monetize Code First Girls, in order to scale Code First Girls, it had to start with employability and work backwards from employability and data around employability to then provide the right ratios of free education to the right women in order to meet the needs of the organization. So that was the fundamental shift that took place.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think from somebody who was watching from the side, this is a powerful point, but it’s something I’ve heard from a number of guests. It’s taking something that in and of itself is not broken, can be successful, but that stepping back and looking at its component parts. Because it isn’t just about good learning, it’s thinking about the outcomes you want for the customer, for the user. And then looking at the data you have, what’s missing, but how can you actually jet power what you do have?

Anna Brailsford:
We’re able to take this across several different countries, which we have done, and that was a real test for us as well. I was like, “If this works in the UK in different regions, in every region of the UK, can this work in Poland? Can this work in Switzerland? Can it work in the States?”

But the theory behind what we did is we simply wanted to know from employers by region as to where the jobs were actually going to sit over the next five years. Sounds like a really simple thing to do. We collected those data points. So we have about 130 companies that we work with. All of them are pretty large employers, although we are company and vertical agnostic in terms of our clients.

So we collected those data points and then we matched that by region and we matched it by skills gaps, and creating almost like a skills taxonomy around what was actually needed to be able to take those jobs of the future. What did we actually need to train the women in, by what region? And what type of women were going to fit best within different organizations? So we worked backwards from that point.

We also had the data points … So we work with over 80 universities as well. So I’m constantly asked, “Anna, why don’t you accredit what you do with one university?” And I’m like, “Well, we’ve got input from 80. I have a really good idea of what’s being taught in those 80 universities.” The beauty of that is that you can almost take the best practice and say, “Actually, matching that with what companies want, we can rise above it and give our view on what we think is the best thing to learn.”

And the final data point, which of course is absolutely critical to what we do, is the 140,000 women that we’ve taught how to train for free, not just in terms of what they want to get started in a tech career, but also then the data trail they leave once they enter a career in technology and go to the mid-level of their career as well.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I mean that starts becoming the promised land, isn’t it, is looking and tracking impact in terms of what you’ve been able to achieve? Because you now have this view, not just about what’s happening across the UK, but now starting to get more of a global view, from your viewpoint, what are you seeing that works and doesn’t work on the grant?

Anna Brailsford:
First and foremost, the most obvious point and the reason why Code First Girls exists is the alternative to the computer science degree. There are tons of initiatives to try and get women to pick computer science at university. That has been the main thrust, I think, of a lot of effort. And also constant references to whether you’re a girl in STEM, labeling girls in STEM.

And what I found really, really interesting is it doesn’t matter what country you’re in because largely I would say Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia tend to share the same problems in the same patterns. And that is regardless of how much effort’s gone into trying to get more girls to pick computer science at university, the numbers have pretty much plateaued.

So the hypothesis behind this being a career switcher myself, I was like, “Hang on, there’s another way to do this.” And by the way, I would never denigrate the efforts of under 18s because I think it’s exceptionally important to be able to do that in schools, but I just felt there was another way. What is the other way?

And the theory was if you focused on career switchers and if you focused women typically at their penultimate year say of university where they’re starting to think about making a choice in their career, if you focus on those two groups, you get a much higher level of conversion because all our research was pointing to the fact that women come slightly later in life to technology.

So we really, really went hard on these groups in the specific regions with the skillsets that we knew led to the highest level of employability. And those women, when they’re placed in jobs, they’re just absolutely smashing it out of the ballpark.
In fact, some of our data is suggesting if you take a really high performance career switcher, put them on the job after being through the program, within 9 to 12 months on the job, they can actually be overtaking computer science students in terms of performance because they’re so committed to the change.

Because we are looking at their personal levels of aptitude and motivation, and we’re saying, “Actually, we can take someone from any academic background, they don’t even have to have a degree. A lot of the career switchers don’t have a degree. But we can take someone, providing they’ve got the right mindset and we can make them incredibly high performance and get them into these jobs.” And we see that replicated across the seven countries we’re in at the moment.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. So if I’m listening, I’m probably a person in tech, although there will be some people who are interested hearing what you’re saying and frantically Googling Code First Girls, and do that because that’s a smart thing to do. But if I’m a tech person in a company, how can I take what you’re saying and put it to work at my company?

Anna Brailsford:
I mean, first and foremost, obviously subscription to Code First Girls is the most important first thing on your list, obviously.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s a given.

Anna Brailsford:
But secondly, look for alternatives to disrupt particularly entry level. I’ll talk about mid-level talent in just a second.

But what’s really interesting at entry level is that I speak to thousands of organizations and I ask them every single time, what entry level initiatives do you have? And they always say the same thing. It’s like a graduate program. They’ll usually have an apprenticeship program. They’ll have an intern program. And what we’re noticing more and more is that fourth stream is being introduced, which is the career switcher program.

Now obviously Code First Girls do grads anyway, but the career switcher program is being seen as the real opportunity, the real open goal to disrupt entry level talents schemes. And I would say 90% of organizations I speak to are introducing this either towards the backend of this year or early next year, unless they haven’t introduced it already.

And that’s quite simply because they’re seeing their competitors do it, they’re seeing the type of results that are happening when it’s introduced, they’re hearing the women’s stories online. So there’s a massive level of disruption I think in the entry level space, introducing the career switcher. So that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing that we’re seeing changing is the mid-level space. So to date there’s been hardly anything on the market to attract women with two to five years worth of coding experience. I always said if we felt like we had cracked or we could scale the entry level piece, which I feel like we really have, we really have and we’re continuing to do so, we will focus secondly on that mid-level piece.
Because on the whole, if representation at the entry level is around about 17 to 20% depending on the industry, at mid-level, probably more likely to be around 7%. So 50% of women will drop out of tech by the age of 35.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s huge. And Tech Talent Charter did some similar research and it plummets for women, but then it falls off a cliff if you happen to be not being white. And so then if you do that, intersectionality, women of color, they’re just dropping out. And if we can’t retain and if we can’t grow, then we’re just… It’s a leaky faucet, isn’t it? We’re just filling the tub and it’s emptying the other end.

Anna Brailsford:
Yeah. So we felt we’d reached the point, right? I’d reached the point almost in a what can we do next to take things on? What’s the next idea that’s going to really shake things up? And we felt it was in the mid-level space.

So we created a curriculum, it took about a year of R and D actually, focused on either retaining women with two to five years worth of experience to accelerate the career in technology to the next level as an individual contributor. I can’t stress that enough.

There’s a ton of management courses out there, but there’s hardly anything that focuses on enabling women to be outstanding, technical individual contributors either retaining those women, showing them the next step in their career, or alternatively attracting women with two to five years worth of experience. So that’s literally just been put out to market as the next challenge where we see employers really shaking up the space.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think if I’m listening on this call, I think there’s a number of things to really try and get my head around and to drive some action. One, realizing what a smart move and that this bus is already leaving the station in that respect. But it takes a different mindset, doesn’t it? Because as you said, you go out to the companies and they do the same things the same way. And what’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome.

And it requires a different mindset. It’s hiring for, as you said, those capabilities, not the piece of paper, not the number of years experience. It’s looking for that. And it’s also the companies, and I hear this from different guests, that are understanding as employers, you have to be in the business now of building not just consuming skills and talent. You’ve got to be able to, you can’t just be consuming.

And I think in terms of what you’re doing, that shift to understand this wider pool of people and companies that realize it doesn’t even have to be just external, it’s looking at your existing workforce. And we’re in a time where lots of companies are thinking about laying people off, good people, skilled people, passionate about a company or a brand.

There’s a piece there on that conversion piece that means you keep all that institutional knowledge, wider, deeper buy-in to culture and the brand. And then you have somebody that then as you say, within nine months to a year, can be zooming ahead of the others to make that success in the company. Fantastic.

Anna Brailsford:
Yeah, massively. And I think you’re right, I think the move from consumption to building and investing. Let’s face it, this is an investment piece and this will pay dividends not just today, but it will pay dividends five years to come for these companies.

I think as well, companies are starting to get smart to just how expensive some of, for example, contingent labor schemes are or contractor schemes are. It’s really interesting when we talk about women in technology, because when we talk about women in tech, it’s literally the tip of the iceberg. That’s because the data that we have usually represents permanent employees.

When you look under the water and you start to add contractors to that piece, which by the way are almost exclusively male, actually your problem when it comes to representation is far worse than you ever thought.

So it’s also that sense of it’s not okay just to, you need to plug a gap, let’s get the same people that think in the same ways to take contract roles either, rather than actually investing in building the skills in house that are far more representative.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And there is that again, because language is powerful, because too often we look at things like this and we’re describing it as a cost, not an investment. And we don’t say that by not doing it, you’re incurring costs and you’re incurring risk. So it’s a no-brainer, but it takes change. It takes a change of mindset, some culture, some systems, some policies.

But the good news is there are programs like yours, there are companies who are doing it. So this isn’t as if you have to come up with a new, original solution. It’s how do you make that work in your company? Reason number 625 why I love working with Code First Girls.

Okay. And as a woman in tech and a woman who career changes to come into tech, when you look beyond the horizon, look what’s beyond just what’s happening for Code First Girls, what frustrates you and what is giving you some hope or inspiring you? So let’s start with the bad news. When you’re looking at the tech horizon, what’s worrying or frustrating you?

Anna Brailsford:
I mean, I think I’ve said this to you before, Debbie, it’s the narrative around that AI is going to completely destroy the universe. And I actually, I really shouldn’t do this, but when I look at something like Twitter and the number of comments that come through that AI is going to blow up everything and nothing’s going to exist anymore. And I just think that’s far too simplistic of you, of that type of technology.
I mean, the first thing that we’ve got to do is we’ve got to be able to understand how to use it. The second thing that we’ve got to be able to do is understand the data sets that go into creating it. And then the third thing we’ve got to do is make sure the individuals that are actually making it are representative of society, right?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Amen, sister. Preaching on.

Anna Brailsford:
It’s not just the technology in itself, it’s the component parts that go into the technology and how we make sure it’s ethical, how we make sure that it’s built from a multiplicity of views, and how we actually build to accommodate and embrace that technology. I always think you should embrace new technologies. You’ve got to find a way to be able to do that and to be able to do it safely.
So no, I don’t think it’s going to take over the world, but where it does pose massive dangers is the human element to the technology. It’s actually not the technology, it’s how it’s harnessed and executed by human beings. And it’s up to us, we have the moral responsibility to make sure it’s used correctly and to make sure it’s representative.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think this is the heart of what we need to be. If we are anything in and around tech, there is that imperative. We cannot wait for someone to save, to regulate, to fix. We can’t just hope the bad players are quietly taken off the piece. If we want to do this, technology, whatever its form, is a tool and it’s down to us as humans to ensure the use of that tool.

So we’re never powerless. We’re never helpless in this, if we’ll just get off our backside, if we use our voice to challenge the narrative, to bring in the structures, to look at how we support effective regulation, compliance, but also educating people, isn’t it?

So it is one of those things because it does have a watershed moment, if for no other reason than because media loves it because there’s no better clickbait at the moment, is there? And it’s selling films, it’s selling TV shows as well as taking over on social media.

So as tech, we need to bring our voice, our experience, our good sense to be clear what it is and what it isn’t and what we can do with that. It is a neutral piece that we can shape for good or fail.

Anna Brailsford:
It’s also the topic of fantastic dinner conversation. The amount of times I’ve been having dinner and someone’s turned to me and said … And it’s classic. I mean, it gets to the point in the night, you’ve probably had two to three glasses of wine so people are feeling slightly more brave and they will say, “Anna, surely AI is going to make Code First Girls completely irrelevant.”

And I’m just sitting there thinking actually, it’s the complete opposite of that to me, because quite frankly, yes, for us to get a woman into AI and ML, which we do train for incidentally, we’ve got to make sure that they’ve got those Python skills as a foundation. We’ve got to make sure that they’ve got the foundation and then we can retrain into areas that are even more critically underrepresented like AI and ML.

So I’m thinking actually, you have no idea of how it’s going to increase demand in these areas, providing providers have the right type of communities, they have the right talent base, and they’ve got the right curriculum in order to ensure women can move into AI and ML. So for me, it’s like the opposite side of the coin.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it’s an opportunity. Because it’s so much in the media, this is a great way to grab eyeballs and to grab hearts and minds to come into tech for these career changes for the young people, et cetera, because this is something. This is a frontier they can shape, they can change.

And after the second glass of wine, it is about changing minds around that dinner table, on the tube, wherever we’re seeing them, to really change that mindset and try and take it in a different direction.

Okay. Well then, what do you look at that you deep-down think that’s kind of cool or that inspires me, this is excellent that it’s happening in tech?

Anna Brailsford:
Well, for me, like I said, the reconversion piece into AI and ML, but also the reconversion piece into cyber. So we’ve seen an explosion in the demand for cyber skills over the past couple of years. Again, these are really hard skills. They’re not something that’s readily available within the population, let alone within a population of women.

So we would’ve had a large proportion of the guys in those roles retraining to go into something like cyber. That retraining and re-skilling aspect I think is really, really important from a cyber and AI and ML point of view, because we are taking somebody that’s been in a more traditional tech stack and we’re able to take them and put them into those types of specialist skill groups.

So for me, that actually really excites me because the way I see the global skills economy almost, I kind of see it from a pure supply and demand point of view, as to what have you got to do to fulfill this demand? What does the supply look like and what do we have to do to change the nature of the supply to meet the demand?

And I hate the way I’ve broken that down because obviously what we do is highly emotive and incredibly important for the economy and for women in general, but when you break it down, it is a pure supply and demand issue. And there is answers, there’s answers in there. It’s just a question of how you use data and how you match the supply and demand up.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It’s interesting, as I’ve been working on the podcast, that golden thread, if there is one thing throughout every aspect of tech, every person I’m talking to tech, it is the understanding that value goldmine of data. And it’s not even a matter of we’ve got to go out and get more data. It is understanding that data and really knowing and using our data can unlock all manner of things, whether it be training, whether it be successful products, et cetera.

Okay. So now, when you’re not driving Code First Girls to global domination for good, Anna, what are you reading, listening to, going to that inspires you?

Anna Brailsford:
What am I reading at the moment? So I finished Shoe Dog not so long ago, and I find it really funny. So when I go on holiday or I have a break, for some reason I have to have a book with me. And I think that’s because, I don’t know, I want my mind to still be active, but I want to focus on other things. So actually creating that time enables me to open my mind up to different ways of thinking.

So I really, really enjoyed Shoe Dog because I think it’s written from the mentality, obviously, of the founder. It’s written by Phil Knight. You have this impression that Nike’s this unbelievable company that’s always been mega successful. And the way he describes the first couple of years, there’s so much humor in it. And you think no, that didn’t happen to him too, because the amount of war stories you have as a founder is absolutely absurd. You have to be able to laugh or you just cry.

And there’s this point at the end of the book, I can’t remember it verbatim, but it’s one of the best quotes that I’ve heard in a long time. And he said, “Listen, if you are a disruptor, if you want to be subversive around your space,” which Nike was, right?

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah.

Anna Brailsford:
It was deeply subversive.

Debbie Forster MBE:
They changed the game.

Anna Brailsford:
Yeah, they did. If you want to do that, be prepared to put your head above the parapet and be prepared to have a target on your back. And he makes the point that that’s going to happen and you have to be brave enough to do that. But if you do that and you do that well and you’ve created something fantastic in the meantime, you are doing something that will give you meaning and purpose in your life that will be unrivaled. So it’s a really, really great book.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it sounds great to hear the meaning and purpose beyond the money, what makes it. And it’s why I love having the podcast to hear people like you, what makes you tick. Super. We’ll all add that to our list to read.

Anna Brailsford:
Amazing.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. So listen, Anna, once the podcast is over, we can carry on talking, but I’m going to have to release the listeners out back into the wild. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech.

Anna Brailsford:
Thank you very much.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at xtech@fox.agency. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

Annonuncer:
Keep exploring the world of tech. Subscribe to our podcast and never miss an episode. To discover more opportunities for global B2B tech brands, visit fox.agency today.