Angelia Brekke scheduled a mandatory team meeting, giving her team plenty of notice to clear their calendar for the afternoon. She didn’t want any excuses, and asked that no one multi-task during the meeting. The team needed to be present and focused.
Angie opened the meeting by sharing the team’s performance metrics. There weren’t any issues. Everyone was doing “a phenomenal job.” The team was doing such a good job that no one was taking a break. They all were working really hard, for a really long time. Everyone was struggling with unplugging, with getting away. There was so much going on, they felt they couldn’t take time off, that they would let the team down if they did.
“After I finished with the metrics, I gave the entire team the afternoon off,” Angie says. “They could do whatever they liked with the time, except work. Go for a walk. Play with the kids. Take a nap.” While she couldn’t make her team not work, she let them know that if they were caught making a work-related phone call, sending a text, email or even a fax, she would charge them a $100 fine. She wanted her team to take a much-needed break, and that’s what they did. She collected no fines that day.
The meeting says a lot about the culture at Genesis10, Dev10, its talent creation program, and the woman herself.
An Entrepreneurial Spirit
Angie’s mom valued education and viewed it as a pathway to a different kind of life. With her support, Angie was the first of her extended family to graduate from college—with a computer science degree. There were few women in technology then (as now), and Angie was quickly on a fast track to management. She worked in consulting at Ernst & Young and other companies then landed a role with Genesis10, a technology consulting firm based in New York. Angie works at the Genesis10 branch in St. Paul.
Drawing Angie to Genesis10 at the time was the entrepreneurial spirit of the company which is owned by Founder and CEO Harley Lippman. There’s little bureaucracy at Genesis10, Angie says. Harley sets the vision and the culture for the company which is “fundamentally, we have a core belief in human potential, the ability of people to learn, grow and adapt.”
Don’t get Angie wrong. Genesis10 is laser focused on executing and results. “But, we do that with a level of compassion that is uncommon in our industry.”
Compassion Sets Genesis10 Apart
At Genesis10, “we recognize that how we treat one another, how we are with one another, is how others outside our organization, our clients and consultants, experience us,” Angie says. “If we are not treating each other well, it will be noticed. You can’t hide that behind a curtain. We focus on making sure that we treat each other with respect.”
Among functional departments–sales, recruiting, finance, IT, HR, marketing and others—there is a strong sense of equality. “Our approach is that it takes all of us, across all functions, to make what we do happen. Everyone is valued for their contribution. This is key. We are very execution-focused but we do so with a compassion for one another and all those we interact with. It really sets us apart. I can tell you all this,” she says, “but you may not believe it until you come to work for us and see it in action.”
Listening Just a First Step
Angie believes that we now are going through one of the most significant shifts in the employer/employee contract in a generation. “Employees really want to be co-creators,” she says. “They want to understand how they contribute in a very direct fashion to the mission of the organization, and to be involved in the creation process. It’s not just leadership listening to employees. That’s a first step.”
One hallmark of Genesis10 is transparency, which comes from CEO Harley Lippman. Every month, Harley leads an all-employee Teams meeting where each branch shares its performance metrics with the entire company. Everyone on the call has the opportunity to weigh in, to discuss the issues of the day, each branch’s key challenges and opportunities. Everyone’s ideas are valued. Genesis10 has offices located across the U.S., from St. Paul to Dallas to Charlotte to Cleveland.
It is within this culture that Angie and Tara Wyborny, Vice President of Talent Development at Dev10, felt comfortable proposing their idea for Dev10, “a talent creation program motivated by our belief in the unlimited potential of people. Designed in direct response to the talent shortage, Dev10 creates new tech talent.”
As Genesis10’s core business is consulting, Angie and her team were hearing from clients that some essential skills, namely the Java programming language, were in short supply. The team recognized that there were not enough developers to meet demand and it didn’t appear likely that there would be anytime soon, due to changes in immigration policy under the Trump administration and low numbers of college students pursuing degrees in computer science.
“There was going to be enough pain around solving this problem that clients would entertain more creative solutions,” Angie says. “At that point, Genesis10 had 10 years of experience working with junior talent, recent college graduates, putting them through a light transition from the classroom to the conference room type of training and having our clients put them into junior roles, whether they were business analysts, project managers, and even developers with comp sci backgrounds.”
A More Creative Solution
Angie and Tara figured they’d take that art that they developed over the years and put more training behind it. They came up with a plan that called for three months of intensive, immersive training that takes recent college grads and career changers who have the raw aptitude and the passion to want to be a software developer, and place them on great projects with some amazing companies. That’s how Dev10 got started. Since then, Angie’s team recognized another new gap, that could potentially be as large as Java, and that is data analysis.”
In the four years since Angie and her team launched a pilot in St. Paul, Dev10 has expanded nationwide to such Metro areas as New York, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Dallas, Austin, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Hundreds of people have completed the training and are working as Software Developers and Data Analysts/Engineers with some amazing companies. By the end of this year, Dev10 is expected to double in size.
Lifelong Learning
One client, a healthcare insurer, shared that they find oftentimes that it’s easier to bring on a Dev10 Associate than a 10-year seasoned consultant. The client shared that Dev10 Associates are contributing to a project in 1-2 weeks. “It’s amazing to hear because most people have the perspective that maybe in two months we’ll get something out of our junior talent,” says Angie.
Key—and a differentiator for Dev10—is removing the requirement of a comp sci degree, which greatly expands the talent pipeline—and increases its diversity. Most CS programs have become very theoretical and less hands-on practical in terms of coding skills. If a CS grad and a Dev10 Associate both work on the same project, clients say that the Dev10 Associate will outperform the CS grad initially, in terms of their ability to dig in and get work done, but over the course of a year, year and a half, the CS grad gains those skills while Dev10 Associates gain the theoretical skills. At the two-year mark they are probably at the same place.
A next evolution in Dev10 is to remove the bachelor’s degree requirement. “We believe so much in our process, in our ability to vet someone for aptitude and passion for this career field and future success, we believe we can strip that away,” says Angie.
The people who go through Dev10 are insatiable learners. Because of that, they are also very adaptive. They happily accept that if that’s how you want it done, okay, great let me get to work on it. Dev10 Associates are like sponges. They are in a role to learn. They’re open and excited.
As the Dev10 team sees it, software development and data are fields where there is a place for everyone to be successful, whether the individual is the exceptional communicator or the thoughtful introvert.
As for Angie, “the advice I would give someone is be passionate, commit and care. Every job can be your dream job. You have to find the joy in it and recognize that that’s going to change over time.”
