How iO Upskills Its Workforce to Retain Talent

By offering its – mainly junior – employees tailored learning journeys and personal growth, iO gained several substantial benefits in return. Employees grew quicker to higher, experienced roles within the company; they felt more belonging and job satisfaction, and new talent was easier to attract from outside the company. The close collaboration between iO and Xebia Academy resulted in tailored learning solutions that fit the company’s specific learning needs. Read more to experience the full story.

In this time of The Great Resignation, Xebia Academy and iO sat down together to come up with a plan to retain iO’s talent pool and attract new talent. One of the outcomes was that the tailored learning journey program enabled iO’s team to grow more rapidly than before. Explore how we collaborated closely with iO and learn about our journey toward setting up a successful custom learning program.

“It remains difficult to find good people in the market,” says Friso Geerlings, Technology Director at iO in Eindhoven. “Everyone is looking for communicative team players with a solid technical base.”

iO is an end-to-end agency with a growing team of experts in communication and digital transformation. With services in strategy, content creation, marketing, and technology, they work in a highly volatile digital market. One of the cornerstones of their success is the iO campus concept, a place where they can meet and exchange ideas with colleagues, clients, and partners, spread all over Europe.

Friso is in charge of the Technology service line, a team of engineers focused on creating tools to solve complex web and integration problems. Think about financial services and security-related projects, though their scope also extends to complicated e-commerce platforms that incorporate many other systems.

Currently, roughly 150 people work at the iO campus in Eindhoven, to design and run technical projects for airports, medical service providers, and financial institutions. Attracting talent remains a complex and universal problem, however. Demand is high, especially in the Eindhoven region. Unsurprisingly, iO needs more than 150 specialists to enable its growth. That’s one of the multiple reasons why iO has chosen to invest even more in its people. More specifically, in jointly creating development programs for the talent pool that is already in-house.

Friso is in charge of the Technology service line, a team of engineers focused on creating tools to solve complex web and integration problems. Think about financial services and security-related projects, though their scope also extends to complicated e-commerce platforms that incorporate many other systems.

Currently, roughly 150 people work at the iO campus in Eindhoven to design and run technical projects for airports, medical service providers, and financial institutions. Attracting talent remains a complex and universal problem, however. Demand is high, especially in the Eindhoven region. Unsurprisingly, iO needs more than 150 specialists to cope with its growth.

Through this combination of gaining experience and following tailored training, Friso believes that, as they have already experienced, these talented juniors can handle more responsibility much sooner – more than you would expect from people who have just left school.

For example, Friso and his team saw that junior software developers, with their limited experience and only two rounds of training, were already at a level that would typically require someone with ten years of experience to reach. A challenging job for any recruiter to do.

“Our ambition is, therefore, to offer our employees (even) bigger learning journeys,” Friso continues. “To delve a bit more into simple analysis methods and customer understanding. We want to include training like Xebia Academy’s as a standard part of their personal growth and development plan.”

Since 2016, iO has been working with Xebia Academy. Seven years later, they’ve already run about 30 training days together. In close collaboration, we’ve set up various learning journeys that fit the development paths that have been set up for iO’s employees.

What is particularly pleasing about this cooperation is that a training course has been jointly developed that is completely tailored to iO’s needs, Friso explains. Based on proven Xebia Academy’s building blocks, but adapted to the target group within iO.

On a daily basis, the software developers taking part in these courses deal with questions like: “How can I ensure that the software meets the customer’s needs? And when coming across an issue, is the customer aware of the issue? Is it perhaps a known unknown or an unknown unknown?”

Together with the customer, they will then explore a possible software solution. The goal is to determine what the software needs to do and test the requirements in an iterative process. However, a more efficient process and proven methodology could directly speed up this process, run projects more efficiently, and deliver faster.

So, iO and Xebia Academy sat down to determine the specific demand for the desired learning journey around customization and integration projects. In doing so, we defined two axes:

The result of our deliberation was that we developed training that included a combination of both Domain-Driven Design and Agile Architecture.

“Software is beyond the point of writing requirements and building out. We went to an Agile process to see results quickly and then iterate,” Friso states.

The first group of people who went to the training comprised 15 young software developers who were excited to become an architect. This five-day training can roughly be divided into two parts:

The training course covers, among other elements, the topics below.

More than three rounds of this training have been organized. After each round, iO and Xebia Academy work together to fine-tune the training content and setup.

One of the outcomes of that fine-tuning was the desire to go more in-depth. For example, the content of one of the latest courses focused more on IO-specific cases. As a result, last fall’s program was even more extensive than the previous learning sessions.

As Friso put it:
“One of the strong, if not the most powerful, elements of this collaboration and training: besides the conventional building blocks, we can expand the training course with challenges we experience within IO.”

With the developed learning program, we ensure that we complement the technical skills that college and university graduates had already acquired during their studies. By mimicking a software developer’s practical skill development, they can experience the skills they usually acquire during the first few years on the job.

The learning journeys are aimed at helping employees with different experience levels, though the first classes were aimed at iO’s ‘newbies’. Often, employees who freshly started at the company and just left college or university. These journeys not only open opportunities for employees but also for iO and the different project teams within the organization.

As students gain experience as ‘software developers, iO equips them with the skills necessary to advance to the ‘architect’ role on complex software development projects.

In the words of Friso, “With the correct and, thus, greater experience in architecture and technique, as well as the direction of professionals who also like educating young people, we can assist our teams to grow and develop more quickly.”

This means that iO can quickly promote junior workers to more medior roles in projects where their colleagues are familiar with iO processes. Consequently, employees who’ve been in a medior position can move on to senior positions at a higher pace. A win for all.

The mix of theory, cases, and practical exercises is beneficial to the overall learning goals and is all tailored to fit the needs of iO’s customers.

Friso is confident that you don’t have to remember 100% of a training course you followed. He believes it’s more important to apply what you learned to your context. Know what else is out there so you can make a conscious decision.

By running some large projects themselves, the trainees could experience in real life which elements of the course they could apply themselves. At the same time, they were able to come up with new questions, which served as input for their own unique learning journey.

In short, the success of iO’s learning program can be summarized as follows.

Are you looking to upskill your team(s) or employees? Let us know; we are happy to help you with a tailor-made learning solution or setting up an entire Tech Academy.