University College London has recently embraced the tech talent of the future by working alongside La Fosse Academy. We look at the university’s tech challenges, ambitions, and how the La Fosse Academy associates have helped ready it for the future.
Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world, UCL is home to around 13,000 staff, 42,000 students and 6,000 research professionals.A multidisciplinary university, UCL’s digital mission is to transform user experience through next-generation technological solutions. They envision researchers rapidly discovering solutions to their questions, students accessing market-leading, hybrid learning experiences, and evolving core digital infrastructure to maximise collaboration and simplify employee’s lives across the university.
The university aimed to develop the capability and mindsets to deliver effective and ambitious digital change at speed. They faced challenges achieving change, as well as the need to invest in new capabilities within its tech teams – particularly in finding people with both systems knowledge, as well as a flexible skillset in today’s complex technology landscape.
Their goal was to change the culture of how tech is developed. Rather than an isolated group of individuals delivering IT projects, they wanted to invest in multi-disciplinary teams of ‘T-shaped’ individuals (i.e. tech generalists with deeper expertise in specific disciplines) to take responsibility for a tech product or feature at all stages.The UCL team were keen to stay agile too - delivering change incrementally, balancing efforts alongside the varying needs of the university.
Sophie Harrison, UCL’s Director of Product Delivery, says: “Globally, the demand for technology talent is enormous, and supply limited. Organisations can barely keep up, so we are always competing to secure the skilled and talented people we need.”
To help UCL achieve these, the university turned to La Fosse Academy. As a tech training company selecting from the top 2% of talent, La Fosse Academy associates are trained in software development and technology fundamentals. They are mentored and coached throughout their two-year placement to ensure they can deliver precisely what the client wants.
La Fosse Academy onboarded their tech trainees into a new ‘Code Force Alpha’ team at UCL. Thanks to their expert training at La Fosse Academy, this team brought a fresh perspective, their flexible mindsets to help them stay open to understanding the existing knowledge and skills of UCL teams, while also introducing their own cutting-edge tech know-how.
UCL’s Chief Information Officer, Andy Smith, believes the trainees have made a real difference, in particular their appetite for solving problems. He says: “It’s great to have an injection of a new kind of talent from La Fosse Academy. They come in and complement the people who really know the university well.”
UCL aim to deliver technology that makes peoples’ lives simpler and allows them to respond to change effectively – such as building a catalogue of reusable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support researchers in finding information more easily, and reducing the time it takes to access the right data.
Post-pandemic, they are also investing in augmenting in-person learning experiences by maximising the benefits of online learning experiences.
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University College London has recently embraced the tech talent of the future by working alongside La Fosse Academy. We look at the university’s tech challenges, ambitions, and how the La Fosse Academy associates have helped ready it for the future.
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