Building a technology academy inside a business

This article was co-authored with Dmitri Grabov. Follow him on twitter he is excellent!

One of the things I appreciate about sports is the notion of academy.

Unlike sports not all business run an academy. So, when is a good time for you to invest in creating an academy?

Having someone grow through the ranks in a club to become a professional is a magical moment. Academies have been the foundation of some of the best football teams of all time. Cruyff identifies the Ajax Academy has the enabler for creation of total football, a new philosophy of playing that changed the power dynamics in football forever.

Further, academies show a social commitment to local communities and grass roots development of the sport.

In some clubs however, there’s no time to waste and short term planning takes priority. The same happens in businesses and so we rarely see good software engineering and digital product academies.

But hiring a top team for your starting eleven is not a bad idea at all: transformational projects are riddled with problems and you should do all you can to show a results quickly. At YLD we often help our clients augment their teams exactly to this effect. No results, and it quickly turns to a blame game and ballooning costs.

However, considering the long term your business must create incredible technology capabilities to survive in a digital economy. The pace of change is relentless in the age of wonderfully dissatisfied customers. Miss a beat and you might find yourself out.

Building your own team is the only sustainable way to ensure the rate of change you need in your organisation.

Having an internal academy gives you the ability to do so, by adding new team members as they become ready to work in a professional manner.

However, to set up an effective academy there’s a degree of planning and strategy that you must respond to before starting:

• An academy requires an incredible aptitude from the students. Just like in football this makes it very competitive to even have enough capability to make it to the first team. Your recruitment needs to be very good at identifying skills, culture match and personality (desire to improve) at a very granular level. Just like in football, the definitions of roles in technology is fluid. What it meant to be a number 10 in the 90s has nothing to do with a modern number 10. You need to have the ability to foster the development of players in a way that they can succeed in modern day business.
• You need coaches for an academy and that has a costs. In football it’s retired players and sports managers but in business this is more difficult as often technical positions don’t want to graduate into management positions. External coaches in business are costly and their quality varies wildly, hence not very suited to an academy. So you ask yourself, can I pay (in velocity or just buy specifying a budget line) for an academy?
• You need mentors. Learning by doing is the best thing you can do early on in your career and pairing with an experienced member of the team is one of the best ways to learn. Once again in high risk delivery projects it’s hard to justify not having a senior member of a team helping to deliver the project, both from a risk and a financial perspective
• You need a learning and development function since you need to give people guidance on how they can improve. You need to invest in their training, as well as integrating them into your team with summits and events. This also is a cost to the organisation
• You need to engage with communities to give them opportunities to increase their understanding of practices outside your organisation and develop critical professional skills. Open source is a great example of this. If the community sees your company as a “force for good” and sees that your alumni are successful, further generations will have a bigger talent pool. Fail to do this and you will have less talent available.
• You need a career framework, hiring principles, people process, incentives, clear guidelines for graduation. This should by now be standard practices, but in my experience the understanding of software engineering and digital products inside big organisations is wildly different and few have defined these artefacts, let alone agree on best practices.
• The average tenure of an executive is two years (made up statistic that is likely true) and there’s no incentives to build capabilities. Hence executives will often optimise for delivery and then shift to a outsourcing model that makes the structure more capital efficient. Boards are often oblivious to these challenges and fail to set appropriate expectations. The stock market sells a continuous and forever increase in capital for those who participate but in reality we know quarterly profits and short term thinking normally take priorities. Executive incentives are normally tied to those.
• Sometimes something as simple as the funding of a company changes incentives in a way that makes it difficult to justify the investment: public company, private, venture backed, etc
• There’s a possibility for abuse of power dynamics of young vulnerable people

One way for companies to get started in developing staff is to use an external, ready made academy which can provide several advantages.

First of all, teaching is hard. Unless you have done it before, it can challenging figuring out what material should be included in your lessons and in what order. Similarly, it can be a challenge knowing when your teaching is working and when it’s not, and more importantly what to do in such a situation. By using an external academy, you do not need to worry about any of those problems. All you need to do is build a good relationship and be ready to pick out the best graduates at demo day.

Using an external requires no upfront investment and the hard work has already been done for you. Teaching is done by passionate, experienced instructors who know to shape and mould passionate students into ready-made developers who will provide your company with the next generation of talent.

This approach may not be so easy in practice. To begin with good academies are rare and finding one whose syllabus is aligned with your requirements could be hard. One of the reasons for that is that running an academy is expensive, therefore one way they can lighten the load is focussing on technologies which are more beginner friendly but may not have the greatest usage in industry such as Ruby on Rails.

In addition, an external academy has different incentives one in-house. Typically, they make money by charging admission to students who want to become software developers. The more students pass through their door, the more money they make. Therefore they are incentivised to keep the standards just high enough for graduates to be able to get work, but no higher as that would eat into their profits.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of using an external academy is that you miss out on helping your own staff grow by training and mentoring. Teaching is often thought of a one way street, passing knowledge from teacher to student. However, anyone who has taught a subject before will tell you that teaching forces you to deeply evaluate own knowledge, address any gaps and constantly re-evaluate one’s understanding of a topic. By providing your in-house developers with eager students, you give them the opportunity to grow an improve in one of the most powerful ways possible.

There’s one thing I learned by all the attempts I’ve seen to create an organised academy: you can only do it if you plan to answer all of the above before even starting. You need an operating model, answer to all those questions, you need people to manage, and you need to understand the money and time commitment it will take. You need executive sponsorship of the project.

The worse thing you can do is to try to do it as a side project. There is nothing worse than working alongside incredible people and failing their development. And when the pressure to deliver is there and you didn’t have the clarity up ahead you will find yourself with limited choices.

However don’t let any of this discourage you. Knowledge is key. By tackling the problem before starting and understanding the setup you need you increase your chances of success.

Companies are made of people, and investing in them is the best possible use of your time. By setting up an academy you are making sure you develop the very best talent, in a way that fits your culture. More, you create grassroots connections to your community, and in business as in life you only get what you give.