Post BREXIT Britain Still Needs to Draw From a Global Talent Pool for DevOps Success

As I sit here on a plane bound for India it has given me a chance to pause and take stock of the challenge that we, and many other top technology consulting firms face in finding excellent candidates.

At Automation Logic we have set ourselves the mission to turn IT Services from a necessary evil into a competitive advantage for our customers. We believe that by building ever leaner, highly automated IT services, we can enable our customers to build both platforms and teams capable of delivering at greater speed and higher quality, with lower risk.

Sounds pretty straightforward – right? But in order to achieve this goal we need to identify and recruit some top flight talent regardless of where they may be currently located.

To be successful the right candidates need a subtle blend of great software engineering capability, harmonised with IT operational (DevOps) experience . At the same time they also need to be outgoing and personable, such that they are able to “lead from within”. We (and our clients) prefer that our staff fully integrate into the team they are going to be working with, on-site, side-by-side. Lastly that they must be both quality and customer service oriented, able to represent and deliver on behalf of Automation Logic as a whole.

To say that such a combination of talents and qualities is rare would be an understatement! Just look at our latest hires to get a sense of the lengths that we go to to find great people.

Britain has its pool of talented engineers to be sure, but one look at where our current team are drawn from (something like 10 different countries, both within the EU as well as from much further afield), around 40% of our workforce, and it quickly becomes apparent that if we’re to make significant in-roads in transforming our client’s IT Services we have no choice but to continue to search on both a local and global basis.

And so I find myself somewhere over Europe heading to Bangalore to interview candidates – not to outsource to India, but to relocate key individuals to the UK to work within our client projects. While IT automation itself is location agnostic – once automation is created, it can be run from anywhere, we believe that development in the UK ensures a cohesive team and synergy with our clients that outsourcing can not provide. India’s recent growth as a software development centre is something that hasn’t passed us by and we think we can find some excellent people there that meet our tough criteria.

There’s a risk that post BREXIT Britain may turn inward. There’s zero chance of that happening at Automation Logic, and for our clients and for Britain as a whole that can only be a good thing.