International home improvement company Kingfisher plc turned to La Fosse Academy to support its in-house engineering capabilities. We examine the ways in which we collaborated with Kingfisher to meet their hiring ambitions.
Offering home improvement products across nine European countries, multinational retail giant Kingfisher plc operates under well-known retail banners including B&Q and Screwfix. It has more than 1,500 stores and around 80,000 colleagues supporting it.
The company’s hiring ambition is to grow an industry-leading engineering function by building out its in-house tech capabilities with new permanent engineers, as well as investing in its own people to develop engineering products at scale.
Kingfisher's strategy is to build their internal teams’ capabilities, as well as building and embedding a pipeline of early talent, and further developing their skills and capability. They also aim to leverage specific capabilities from niche partners that they can readily scale up and down.
Kingfisher’s engineering department were looking for alternative strategies to build its long-term tech capability, alongside their long-term partnerships with third party engineering contractors.
Given the current competition in the market for high-quality tech talent, Kingfisher were keen to address the challenge of bringing in significant numbers of tech talent, and with particular focus on diverse, early-stage individuals.
Sean Burton, a lead engineer at Kingfisher says:
“It’s a highly competitive area which is very difficult sometimes to recruit. So, we really wanted some help from La Fosse Academy to get the top diverse talent in the wider area.”
Kingfisher brought on board La Fosse Academy engineers with high-level technical skills. Sean says:
“What really attracted us [to La Fosse Academy] are the regular cohorts, the fact that La Fosse Academy prepares groups of highly skilled engineers every month. This is brilliant for us.”
Having already established itself with Kingfisher’s group technology and engineering departments, La Fosse Academy embedded their tech associates into other departments, such as systems integrations engineering, quality assurance and testing. The aim was to address the hard-to-find skill sets the company needed by investing in bespoke career pathways and skills development.
The two organisations share corresponding diversity agendas, and La Fosse Academy was able to help Kingfisher increase their tech team diversity, alongside addressing technical skills gaps. As a result, bringing the La Fosse Academy associates on board has brought a more diverse way of thinking, allowing Kingfisher to look differently at its day-to-day technical challenges, and encouraging it to develop new innovative ways of working.
Overtime, the associates at Kingfisher have created a unique community within La Fosse Academy, with colleagues connecting and learning from each other through buddy systems and mentoring schemes. With Kingfisher also having a hand in facilitating these schemes, both organisations continue to develop a thriving working relationship.
La Fosse Academy is now preparing for the first group of associates to transition to full-time employee status. Ursula Line, Head of Client Partnerships at La Fosse Academy says:
“What makes my job very easy is that every review we have shows that engagement levels are really high among our associates at Kingfisher. They have lots of scope for career progression and a super engaged management team there.”
Pearl Hamilton, a La Fosse Academy engineer at Kingfisher, says the programme set her up for success by giving her the fundamental skills and confidence to work on products effectively and tackle any unknowns. She says: “It's all about communicating clearly with other people, and working well together.”
International home improvement company Kingfisher plc turned to La Fosse Academy to support its in-house engineering capabilities. We examine the ways in which we collaborated with Kingfisher to meet their hiring ambitions.
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