CONTENT HIGHLIGHTS

In this episode, Frank is speaking with Dene Palmer from Formpipe. They are a provider of Premium business software for mid-sized to large companies and public organizations wanting to excel in the digital era.

These days, that means that data is core part of business and that customers have a constant need to transform in an ever-changing digital landscape. Clearly that puts high demands on their suppliers to stay ahead of the Digital Skills game.

You´ll learn how Formpipe navigates in this era, and listen in on a talk about Cloud Skills in general.

The central concern of this talk is Skills Shortage. The demand and requirement for Cloud Skills is increasing and everyone is struggling to find people with the right skills. How do we ensure that we don't fall short on Cloud Skills?

From on-prem to SaaS
Formpipe has been transitioning from a company that primarily delivered On-Premise solutions. Now, the core business is based around SaaS solutions and that has put Formpipe on an internal digital transformation journey.

With the Cloud transitions come a whole new range of Skill requirements, including new needs for security, architecture and DevOps Skills.

Customers are just moving to the cloud in larger scales now. They don't want to maintain their on premise solutions and deal with manual upgrades etc.. There's definitely a customer demand that is accelerating, but there are also benefits for suppliers to accelerate their own internal cloud journeys.

What is the real problem with Cloud Skills?
Technology is not the limiting factor to growth anymore, new tech is acquired with the swipe of a card. Skills are the limiting factor. You need Skills to get advantages from technology, that has always been the case, so why is the needs for Skills such a pressing issue now?

Dene raises a point about the cloud being limitless. The way cloud technology develops is continuous, there is more shared infrastructure and several different skillsets required. There is simply a demand for 15-20% new Skills ongoingly now, and not every 4 years when an upgrade happens. So how do we avoid being stopped by the lack of Skills? 

Can we retrain existing resources or do we need new?
The answer falls on choosing a hybrid strategy, of BOTH training existing resources and acquiring new talent based on their fit to the culture and not on their experience. The benefits of a mixed team of experienced senior profiles and graduates are multiple. The graduates are hired based on Talent and their fit to the culture. Formpipe has found that they can be trained to do anything, and where they might lack technical experience they are gifted with new ways of thinking that provides other benefits. They are not constrained by what they already know.

With regard to the senior profiles, they have the experience to be experts in Incidents for instance, and to remain calm and productive regardless of the circumstance, those are also core skills of equal significance.

Both profiles do need ongoing training. It's not difficult with the right person to train them in Cloud technologies, there is a lot of knowledge out there. It's how you organize the content to avoid time wasted, that is key.  

The Know your Skills Quiz
How does a pro such as Dene do on the Quiz? You'll need to listen to learn some very surprising fun facts! ;-) 

For instance - Did you know that 50% of all data has been lifted into the Cloud? and that USA sits on a 61% market share of the Global Cloud market, and Europe sits on mere 21%?

Click the Play button in the image at the top of this page to learn how a very successful company like Formpipe make digital skills work, and get in touch with Readynez at podcast@readynez.com to join the conversation.