okay i think we have everyone joining us now so we're going to get started 

hello and welcome everyone i'm colleen mcintyre i'm the managing director for central texas at genesis 10 

and i'm the moderator of our panel discussion today navigating tech talent hiring challenges 

reskilling and upskilling genesis 10 is presenting this event in partnership 

with sim austin sim austin is the local chapter of the society for information management 

and they provide a unique opportunity to interact with thought leaders throughout the technology and business 

fields the local chapter of austin has programs 

the second tuesday of every month and those can be found on the sim austin website so please check that out and 

join us genesis 10 is proud to be a platinum 

sponsor of sim and for those of you who do not know us genesis 10 is a talent 

workforce solutions and technology consulting firm thank you for joining us today 

excited to have with us our panelists tracy haver who is technology leadership 

development program lead at a t chris hightower senior manager at 

southwest airlines and tara wyborny director of emerging talent programs at genesis 10. 

so welcome tracy chris and tara thank you what i'd like to do now is 

just invite each panelist to introduce themselves briefly and describe your role that you play in 

your company's hiring of technical talent so tracy do you want to start 

hi so i'm tracy haber with att i work in the technology development program 

which is our college hiring and internship programs and um but that program has been in 

place within a t for 20 years for the past eight years i've been in the role of 

operations and strategy for the program we are hiring technology candidates for 

all technology roles in at t usually junior data scientists 

software engineers network engineers and some business analyst types that work within the technology 

space in the company okay and chris do you want to quickly introduce yourself sure hi 

everyone my name is chris hightower and i'm a senior manager in the technology department at 

southwest airlines um been at southwest for about 20 years now 

and i've been in the people leadership for almost 10 years and so i 

i frequently uh i'm staffing uh positions um um my team is uh 

is a development team so we're specifically hiring lots of developers but also uh analysts product owners 

scrum masters project managers so i often have needs for interfacing with 

professional services vendors and also our our own employees that 

we're working on you know how do we retain them how do we improve work on continuous improvement 

of our employees and professional services okay great and tara 

hi i'm tara wyburny i'm the director of emerging talent programs here at genesis 10. 

i've been here uh closing in on i guess eleven and a half years 

i oversee our both traditional college hire program called our g-ten associates 

program as well as over the last three years i've had the opportunity to lead the 

operations and development of our dev 10 program which is a program focused on creating new technical talent 

so my team is responsible for the recruitment and placement of talent across the technology spectrum 

so data engineers data scientists uh software engineers software developers as well as the more 

functional side so project managers business analysts etc um and over the last three four years 

you know my role really has evolved to how we not only create and develop talent that is more work ready than the 

traditional college higher but also in how we improve and continually drive the 

development of talent once they are actually engaged and employed here at genesis 10. 

okay great thank you all so we want today's event to be interactive and we encourage you to join our 

discussion by submitting your questions in the chat box so with that we'll get started a recent 

article in the harvard business review finds that coming out of the pandemic organizations will need to prioritize 

re-skilling and upskilling to attract and retain the talent they need to make their businesses grow 

those that do will boost the motivation of their existing workers and gain the attention of the brightest 

new recruits positioning themselves to emerge from the pandemic not just where they were but stronger 

and in a better position to move forward i think that we can all agree that 

reskilling and upskilling can only help navigate our challenges with hiring tech talent 

so i'm going to start off with a question for each of the panelists the same question i'm going to ask them each to 

answer briefly and that question is what unique programs or solutions have you used or 

created to address the challenges you've had in hiring and retaining tech talent 

and building alternative talent pools so tracy i'm going to start with you all 

right so i think this may be a common theme on the panel but 

probably seven or eight years ago we began leveraging our college hire program as a means and a start to bringing in 

people who were reskilling or very upskilling we also around the same time began upskilling 

our existing workforce with the pace of technology changing as as rapidly as it does you have to do 

both in my opinion if you're keeping a group of any size 

so about seven years ago we first started re-skilling existing employees and the efforts were very successful so 

we began leveraging some of those same partners to fulfill our growing tech talent need 

in several cases our philanthropic arm the att foundation was a great source of help 

they identified a lot of worthy partners that we were funding anyway and we were able to connect the 

student beneficiaries of those scholarships and and fun to meaningful 

careers at atmt 

okay great and chris i'm going to ask you that same question in terms of the unique 

programs or solutions you've used to create and address challenges in hiring tech talent and 

building alternative talent pools yeah um and similar to tracy we do have 

college hire programs um we also have what we call a warrior hire program which is uh we hire um people are coming 

out of the military and who are looking for professional careers so we focus on that uh 

then we also work with a lot of our professional services vendors to bring in talent uh one of the unique 

programs um that we've found is with genesis 10 actually the the dev 10 program that they have 

they're bringing in young or inexperienced technical talent 

um who have gone through a boot camp but can come in and start producing 

quickly but at a low cost sorry at a low cost um 

so in addition to those things um what personally what i mainly focus on is 

ensuring that the people that i'm working with who are recruiting for us 

they have a really good understanding of our corporate values and how my team in particular 

uh functions um so that way when they are bringing in people that we find uh very good fits 

for our team um and i also ensure that um people on my team who are going to be working with those resources um 

are doing the uh are part of the hiring process they're they're interviewing as well um because you know they they will know 

best uh what's going to be a good fit for our team so those are some of the specific things that we do okay 

and tara i'll switch it up so you're not last all the time okay so uh in my role uh 

i have for the last 11 years similar to tracy focus on a a college pipeline of talent 

to be part of our solution of bringing in that next generation of talent and then within our g-10 associates program back 

when we started in 2008 we immediately had a training component associated to really fill those gaps 

between the college degree programs and really the skills that we needed to be able to 

deploy them into our client sites and during that 

experience we really started to see the dynamic shift within the software development space as companies 

started to look for talent that was more than just able to write code um but we're able to engage with the 

business we're expected to move into these more agile pods that's when we really started looking at 

not only is the talent pipeline tight in the technical space but it's 

not necessarily creating the volume or the type of talent that are are we're needing these days to stay 

competitive in the market um so dev10 as as chris referenced he does have a few of our team members on 

his team um was our solution to that um so within dev 10 we create new talent 

through going out and looking for people that are new college graduates that maybe they found software 

development junior senior year and it was just too late to make that switch 

or they're professionals that are you know anywhere from three to ten years out of school and they've become exposed to 

technology through the role i think all of us now are so much more engaged with technology than we ever were a 

decade ago that you know we're finding a large pipeline of talent that really just wants to get their foot in the door there and so 

we created a boot camp model where we actually go out we recruit those high 

aptitude passionate dedicated individuals and we give them the skills they need to be successful so 

as a business that helps genesis 10 and helps our our client partners in turn to have 

access to a more predictable more scalable pipeline of talent that's 

going to have not only those vetted technical skills that you know we need as a consulting 

firm but also those soft skills that have really been a challenge i think in the technical 

space to develop especially those coming straight out of college so it's been a fun 

adventure as we've kind of molded what we learned since 2008 in the traditional college higher model and now we get to 

apply it in a slightly different model where we're truly focused on upskilling and talent 

creation great thank you all for answering that question and then to build on that um tracy i'm going to 

ask what have have been some of the keys to success with regards to onboarding you know kind 

of a unique or newly created talent so um onboarding is something that we 

take very very seriously uh i think there's a whole lot of research and and information out there about how the 

the better you do onboarding the stickier the employee is long term so it's something that we've 

focused very heavily on uh i think probably the greatest 

indicator of that was we moved from a model last year by force where we were onboarding everybody in 

the office prior to march and then suddenly we needed to to onboard everyone virtually so we had to 

react to that very very quickly couple that with the fact that there were shortages of equipment 

and those are things that software engineers can't you can't further engineer without a laptop so we 

had to figure out all the logistics um so that you know was a challenge that 

we tackled but i think one of the things that we do just generally is that regardless of whether your 

rescale upskill or a traditional college hire we treat all new and career hires very 

similarly we bring them all in via the tdp program which is a two-year program at atm t 

and we are set up with centralized leadership so i jokingly refer to them as the 

kindergarten teachers of the corporate world but they probably don't like that very much but they're adept the reason why i do that 

is you know teaching is a noble profession it doesn't matter if you teach kindergarten or college you still have a noble profession and 

there's a unique way that you address someone who's new in career versus someone who has been around the block for 20 years 

so by having that centralized leadership these people are absolutely laser 

focused we have 19 people leaders around the country who bring in tdps their laser focused on 

getting them acclimated and then helping them excel in their new role and because they do this over and over 

again it's very um you know it's old hat there's usually not a challenge they haven't 

already tackled at least once before and they are able to bring folks in 

get them acclimated get them excelling in their role and then i think the one thing that i 

would be remiss to to fail to mention is that we need to provide them with a 

safe environment in which to try and fail they're new in their job um i think probably everyone on this 

call heard about hbo max and integration test email number one um hbo max is an att werner 

media company uh so all of that um you know we have to 

provide them with a safe place to try and fail and support them in learning from a failure when they have those 

so i think that's that's kind of a key to how we do that we also provide 

specialty community so if your role is a software engineer or a data analyst you have 

specialty communities for your role to help you and then we also have an internal 

version of stack overflow so if you have a question that nobody in your specialty community 

can help you with then you have a reference to go out there and and call in the big gun okay 

that's great so a lot of initiatives to support and like you said 

really make them um safe to to know that they can make make a mistake and and learn from that 

um chris i'm going to ask you um you know during 

your journey what have been some of the surprises and what advice would you give in an 

organization that wants to embark on an endeavor to create a program or utilize a program to reskill and up skill 

sure and actually to kind of build off of uh tracy's uh answer on uh on how important 

onboarding is um one of the things that uh as a hiring manager i had to i learned the hard way uh several times 

is um how important it is to to wait for the right person um you know when we have an open 

position to fill it's so uh so tempting to just grab the first person that comes along that seems like 

that might be good but uh you know you get to wait to wait for the right fit 

and um like tracy said make sure that you do a really good job of getting that person well prepared 

you know we for those who've been in hiring manager positions if you make the wrong choice there 

you're not just setting your yourself back uh a month or so to find a new person you're saying yourself back 

like six months to a year because it takes time to find out that that that person is really not the 

right person you know and then you have to go through the entire process of making the decision and making a change 

so yeah i totally agree with you tracy that's so important um so some of the other surprises that 

we've had and of course the the pandemic has been 

a surprise for everyone and uh tracy touched on you know adjusting to to onboarding 

during a pandemic one of the things that we've had to 

address during during that time of of everyone shifting from being in the office to working from 

home is how out of touch people can start to 

feel people who who have strong 

like if you've got a strong fan environment that doesn't affect them as much but we have found 

that a lot of our professionals who may be a single maybe single you know 

at home alone they would go for months without seeing a person and um and starting to 

feel really out of touch and we had some people who had started to develop some real mental health issues because of this um 

so one of the things that we developed on our team was um a uh just being intentional about making 

sure everyone in the team had one-on-one connections with someone else so i have my leads making sure that 

they're having connections with with their leads and their leads are having connections with the individual developers 

to make sure that everybody's getting not just a professional connection but also a personal connection um i 

encourage them to you're not trying to delve into somebody's personal life but you know just check up on them how are you doing you 

know how is your family how you know if they don't have family how are your pets or whatever their condition is you know 

make sure that they know that somebody cares about them and i've heard back from my from my 

leads that that has made a huge difference on our teams to for those people to just know that 

somebody cares about them and in terms of retaining our talents 

we found that that's been a big big factor as well just creating an environment of trust 

and creating environment where people you know that your team cares about you you're much more likely to stay on that 

team than to go look for a position somewhere else so that's that's been a huge factor 

there uh do i have a little bit more time yeah 

so one of the other surprises your question was about surprises there 

one of the surprises um that we've found is that um while training is good 

uh it really it really doesn't um prepare somebody for the role uh the 

best training is experience right so um we have stopped focusing so 

much on getting people the right training as we have just throwing them in on the deep end and um 

you know hoping that they swim but you know helping them along the way obviously we focus on pair programming and 

mentoring make sure that they have what that they need but get them into the actual 

actual work and um and that is the best kind of training is that experience that 

they get so okay i have a question um about you mentioned hiring um 

right the first time so you know what um processes have you put in place to 

ensure that you're hiring right the first time right uh well i touched on this in 

the answer the first question but a lot of it has to do with um knowing your corporate values 

and i'm sure every everyone on this in this panel everyone who's listening 

uh your company has listed values right um those may or may 

not be your actual values it may just be what your marketing people came up with or 

someone came up with 20 years ago that's not really your values and your 

personal team values may be slightly different so we have found it very useful to 

to take a look at those and make sure that you know what your real values are and make sure everyone in your team 

knows those values as well so that way when you're looking for new talent you are you're really comparing those 

those people that you're interviewing with those values so if you're familiar 

with patrick lincione he wrote a very good book about this 

it's called the ideal team player highly recommend you read that and 

there's some example values in there that a lot of companies have adopted um and it may or may not apply to your 

company but the the advice is to really look at your corporate values your team's values 

so that when you're hiring people you're hiring the right kind of person it's really tempting to go hire somebody 

with the right number of years experience we have found that that is those are 

that's useful to have that experience but not nearly as well as hiring the right kind of person 

okay i'm just going to piggyback off of that if you don't mind we went through a very similar exercise 

a little over a year ago where we went through on every job and we determined those 

what are the cultural things that you want to interview for matches and also then we 

forced everyone to define what are the exact competencies that are required to be successful in 

job day one and you'd be surprised how much you can really winnow down to what's needed in a job 

and then we purpose built built from the from scratch the entire interview process 

only to get to what are the things does this candidate possess the skills and competencies that are 

required to do the job day one and so we built tests and interview questions around each of those 

we have we have hr research within 18d has a phd psychologist that help us 

develop questions that get to that and then we created all of our interview guides to 

match so when we are hiring someone we are going through 

very purpose-built do they possess and can they demonstrate the possession of the skills that 

that are required to be successful in the job it was very very critical chris i can't agree 

more so i actually wanted to jump in on something that that chris 

brought up as well which is and tracy i mean frankly it's interesting having gone to this 

remote world had you called me in february of 2019 or 2019 2020 whatever and said hey we're going 

to start onboarding all these people remotely i would have said forget that we're never doing that especially with 

new talent or talent that needs to be changed and then on march 12th i changed my mind because we didn't have a choice 

right um i think we've learned a lot about that onboarding and chris you were talking about you 

know the the loneliness factor i don't know a better way of putting it but that i also saw 

coupled with when we were bringing in new talent no matter their level of years of 

experience frankly there was also this much more intentional way that we have to interact 

now remotely and so we looked at when we were bringing people into training 

how do we create more of those intentional connections so we actually started for our internal team 

doing what we call donut calls right that's purely a social interaction you're scheduling intentional time 

just to get to know your teammates it's not to talk about dev work it's not to talk about 

anything other than your family your hobbies who likes to cook who hates to run whatever 

the other piece was okay once you're in training or you're tackling your job 

we needed to make sure we had a lot of different types of channels available to our staff to 

ask questions because not everyone was comfortable in the hey i'm going to drop in and and 

send a i am to my colleague or i'm not totally comfortable going to my 

lead yet or i don't want to schedule a 30-minute meeting i don't know the the culture here yet in those first few 

weeks so we were really intentional about creating you know almost like what tracy was saying the the wiki type pages that they 

could be resourceful the group channels that they could go to in our we use microsoft teams 

um that they could go to and kind of crowdsource answers as well as having our leadership then 

reach out and start those one-on-one conversations through chat because it's funny how that little 

psychology of i'm gonna be the first one to initiate we saw was actually creating some um 

pause if you will and some of our people going to ask the questions so you know really focusing on how do we 

just engage more intentionally and let them know that we want them to engage right there's no bad question when we're 

in the office it was you know you're right there it's it's much more casual so 

breaking down that and and similar to like what tracy and chris have said that 

hiring the right the right way i will say i've i've also had to change how our 

recruiting team looks and interviews and interacts um virtually as well 

right so how do we make sure that when we're interacting with with talent virtually that we're getting 

the right types of answers and interactions and creating more of that group dynamic so we can see 

how people interact in team settings etc so it's been a really interesting transition 

um you know picking up these small lessons and being able to be really agile with how we interact and onboard 

with our our new staff to make sure that until we're back in person again that they're getting that same level of 

engagement that they had when we were all in the same room together 

and i know um this isn't something we talked about but uh obviously we're talking about um retention um and and so all of these 

strategies i'm assuming have increased your your company's retention rates i don't 

know if anyone can speak to numbers i didn't ask you to prepare for this so i'm just curious 

go ahead tracy go ahead prank so i would say i mean retention 

comparing annualized attrition figures now compared to pre-pandemic is is sort of like apples and oranges but 

um i mean clearly retention is something we're always after especially with this particular group of 

skills they're so it's so hard to replace them in the market that you really always have to be considerate 

of that but yes our attrition improved over the course of the last year but i am 

hesitant to say it's anything i did i think it could have just been people were not ready to move and i 

think we're all sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop we all know you know i was reading this 

morning something like 43 or 53 of the us workforce is saying i hate my 

job i want a new one and many of them are looking for completely different changes like changes to the field in which they're 

working so uh yes it got better but i'm not sure it was me 

and chrissy we're gonna comment as well sure um so one of the other questions that i 

think is coming up in the in the list here was talking about retention and as i as i thought about how to answer that 

question i really started to think about um well what are the reasons why people leave 

um you know if we're talking about how do we retain them we need to know how why they leave and in my experience 

you know i i kind of identified three reasons why why people leave a team you do have 

people who are just career motivated and and they have goals that that you know that they want to 

fulfill that they just can't do on your team for some reason um you know if if you're on a team of 

developers and somebody wants to be an architect and don't have that position on your team they might leave 

because they're offered a new position and there's really nothing not a lot that you can do about that it's one of those things where you can't 

control um so focusing on the things that you can control uh the two two other reasons um 

i've seen people leave if you have a what i would call a toxic team environment 

where people don't either don't feel safe on the team or for some reason they don't feel that 

that they can function within the team you know there's there's a lot of great uh resources out there for how to create a 

good team environment so that would be something to focus on you know ask ask yourself you know what does my team environment 

look like um if you're having a hard time retaining people um and then one of them one of the most 

important reasons uh one of the biggest reasons i've seen people leave teams and i've talked about this a little bit 

already is that if people don't feel appreciated on the team if they don't feel valued right 

it's it's that innate human desire to know that my work the things that i do 

mean something there's a great uh great story about 

obviously it's a not not a real story but um about a uh two men who are 

who are building a wall right and um and somebody comes up to one man and 

says you know well why are you building this wall he's like well you know because i've been told you know put this brick on top of that brick and 

and you know my my life is really meaningless um and then the guy goes to the next 

person and says well why are you building this wall and the man replies because i'm building a cathedral 

right and they're doing the exact same thing but it's totally different uh perspective of the two men um 

and i think our role as leaders is to help our teams have that perspective of that what 

you're doing is important it's making a difference um you're you're helping our company save 

money you're helping our customers have a better experience here you know whatever the case is for 

the work that they're doing really help them to see that value so that way they really understand how they fit into 

the bigger picture and that's made a huge difference on my team just making 

having those people have that perspective so okay great thank you um and we may have 

touched on this a little bit but um you know as you develop these programs 

brought in you know new programs are trying new things what are what are some of the lessons learned what did you wish 

you knew then that you know now and i'll start with tracy okay yeah 

um so i would say that um my biggest lesson learned and this is probably so obvious to everyone 

else that it was an epiphany for me is it's not always easy for non-traditional hires to acclimate with the college 

intern and fresh college grads so we did a lot of we always do a lot of surveys and pulse 

checks and focus groups to make sure we're listening to our employees but through these we heard that 

non-traditional hires have additional struggles with imposter syndrome you know if they didn't grow up 

in a cs major then they tend to question themselves and so they may not also want the same 

things from an office space or they have different personal needs so we built out a list of additional 

resources and those things you know provide help for 

articles about overcoming imposter syndrome and we make sure that we tell them in our 

one on ones that it's okay to be the only person in the room that has to get up at a random time of the day and care for 

child care pick up or an elderly parent or you don't have to feel weird if you're the only person 

who doesn't want to play in the incredibly competitive office ping pong tournament all of those things are very attractive 

to our new and career traditional college grads and maybe not so much so for people who 

have upskilled or reskilled and we make sure that we meet them where they are as well anyone else want to comment on 

that no i can't echo that more i mean i will 

say that i should have been more more prepared for that because 

just look at my own life and compare it to a college student see the obvious you know differences there but it is 

true and making them confident in that difference and that we're here we get it we know where 

you're at we totally respect that and we know where the people like in my group there's lots of people like playing pc games and stuff 

like that and then we've got parents yeah now i've got kids i've got stuff to do and so yeah i agree tracy it's that was a a big 

like how did i miss how did i miss that but we're there now and it's great because 

now we've got those they've got each other too as resources like you're saying being able to connect them and have have them find that 

community of people that are going through a similar life stage than 

you know are more traditional new hires okay yep um i'm going to skip one 

question and come back to it and and go to um you know in addition to these these new programs of talent creation 

programs what is your company doing to upscale current employees um you know retrain them um and increase 

retention we talked about a little bit about the retention piece um before chris but in terms of of reskilling 

and upskilling yeah so uh kind of alluding back to one 

of my previous answers um mainly trying to get them that experience um we do have 

official training programs and uh things like that and those are useful you certainly need a base level of 

understanding before you can even start the work but for the most part we found that 

just getting them the experience you know day one assign them to a user story and 

get them coding on it and we focus on the parent programming 

so that way the the people can learn from each other um mentoring programs where our tech 

leads and our development leads are uh have assigned to people that they're 

mentoring to make sure that those people are getting the right kind of experiences 

one of the one of the struggles that we've had with with kind of upskilling is 

people get comfortable in the role that they're in and uh we may want them to move to a new 

role or we may want them to we're like you know hey you're not growing uh we've sorry 

so so we've had to to be intentional about that where uh one developer was a primary on 

a certain topic or a certain application and we've had to just say okay you're not that anymore you're 

now you're gonna go over here we're gonna put somebody else's primary on that application to force that knowledge transition to 

happen and that's been very useful to make sure that that upskilling is 

is happening as well okay one of the um you know important um 

[Music] focuses of of these programs might be around um how it impacts diversity equity and 

inclusion hiring and so tara if you could speak to that in terms of 

your programs yeah so certainly um college hire in general it has always 

been something that i've encouraged people to consider in terms of creating a more diverse town pipeline because the 

newer generation is is more diverse and also more technically um engaged than previous generations 

right they grew up with the internet and with tablets in their hands right so we've got a 

a new fresh group of more diverse people um coming into the pipeline which is a great way to create that diversity 

um but one of the things that we accidentally did within dev ten and now we're focusing on is that 

when we took away the degree requirement for computer science to enter dev 10 when we said hey 

we're going to go out to all of the degree programs and look for bright people that want to 

do this job we inadvertently created a significantly 

more diverse talent pipeline for ourselves so we saw a tremendous number of women applying to 

our program we saw a tremendous number of people of color applying to our program that 

we wouldn't have had access to had we limited our degree pro focused on people with even some degrees 

initially and as we've expanded out that's really been able to help us drive some 

some pretty impressive numbers around um 53 54 of the people that we bring 

into dev 10 now are either women or um bipod and that's something that has been 

really fantastic to see um just not only the the diversity of 

people but also the diversity of thought that comes with bringing in these 

different backgrounds and also i you know i don't have the numbers to 

prove it yet because we're only three years into this but i think seeing that representation across dev 10 

is also improving that retention within tech right um so as we're able to drive more um 

diverse talent into tech they see themselves represented more frequently in teams which is going to help them 

feel more comfortable confident and hopefully you know five seven years down the road we can look at this and say okay how many of 

those people stayed in tech and and see if that really did drive the outcomes we're hoping for so 

you know now we're really looking at dev 10 as a way to um engage much more outwardly in the 

community to drive more people into tech and really you know continue to double down that 

um accidental um benefit that we reaped when we started and started to evolve 

that program okay great and tracy i think i have 

yeah i have a similar uh similar experience i think a lot of companies view their 

diversity hiring through the lens of benchmarks are you hiring new technologies at a pace that equals graduation rates and 

that's a start but when you look at the incredibly low graduation rates from cs programs for women and black people and brown people it 

becomes really apparent that you've got to find some other funnels so i think you know despite years of 

work to improve it cs female graduation rate is stagnant and has been for the last decade at 18 

so um if you want a greater than 18 share of software engineers you have to 

look elsewhere and so that was also what led us to embrace the skills over school's mindset 

and uh you know we didn't begin our non-traditional journey for this reason but we've certainly been pleased by the outcome i 

think it's very similar to to what you experienced as well tara 

okay and i'm just gonna we've got some questions um i don't know if you i think i'll wait 

towards the end unless you see something that that you would like to respond to here i guess the one question that just came up 

and and maybe would have advice is what about um individuals who are working on job pivoting who 

are graduates of an i.t boot camp but they don't have a degree um you know is there is there any advice 

to um those individuals so i i would say that you know 

so att does not hire from all boot camps we have been very purposeful in who we 

hire from we know the curriculum and we know the quality of candidates that's produced by 

those funnels so i would say if you're looking to go to a boot camp or you've completed a 

boot camp that my my best advice would be to go to that boot camp and talk to them about who's 

hiring from them um and then go after those companies that as well um 

there you're you if you did already attend a boot camp reach out to their career services um 

individuals they should have the relationships with the companies that are looking to hire um i do think that companies you know my 

experience being in in a consulting organization is that i get a chance to talk to 

um hr leaders and technology leaders across different clients and different 

companies and industries and we're making a slow shift um and it's a shift that i really really 

am behind around starting to remove that degree requirement um but you got to look for those 

companies that have have removed that so right wrong or indifferent companies are in different spaces as it relates to 

that requirement and just go and look for them you could there's plenty of resources out there that can point you 

to companies that that have taken that out of their um requirement to hire 

great thank you both um in terms of um 

this kind of leads into that um you know when when you were working with your 

teams how did you get your teams on board with your program to hire candidates from 

the non-traditional backgrounds so when you came to them with the idea of you know hiring that non-cs degree 

individuals or you know how did you get get them on board with this tracy 

yep so i mentioned earlier that the graduates of these programs are coming into the technology development program 

and talked about the the care with which we are selecting the candidates beyond that we're not making 

a big to-do about how they got those skills you just know if you come to tdp you're getting the person with those skills 

and so the receiving organization from their perspective they just see they're getting a tdp higher they're less 

concerned about where the skills were learned and more concerned about the person's ability to do the job so through our 

curriculum within the tdp program we ensure that they're all ready they're ready to be incredibly productive in 

their next job we're thorough with that hiring process we leverage tests and assignments 

and then we spend a couple years teaching them the rest so i think the only other thing that's 

critical to that is that we look for candidates with a continuous learning mindset and chris that kind of goes back to what 

you were talking about earlier maybe back to your value but it's not necessarily a company value we understood early on that in tech 

you know shelf life if you do have a cas degree it's like three to five years 

so if you don't have a continuous learning mindset you're never going to be able to keep up with the pace of change in technology so we're looking 

for people who have that and then we're making sure that on on the end you know the recipient of 

that talent it's it's seamless for them they know they're getting somebody from tdp 

that has the skills okay chris did you have a comment on 

yeah um so i was thinking back to when uh when i first introduced my team 

to this uh this dev 10 concept that genesis 10 has and and bringing in these uh young 

inexperienced professionals uh uh there was there was 

concern on my team um my tech leads were like well you know what am i gonna do with this guy 

um and so i approached it from uh you know a you know hey let's let's 

try this as an experiment um and see how it goes and that's really how we approached it it was 

um you know we don't know if this is going to work or not but let's give it a try if if it works this is a great way for 

us to to bring in some young talent who we can then 

teach and groom the way that we want them to grow and really invest in them and build up 

somebody over time who's going to be a potentially a great employee for their 

company long term so that's kind of how we approach that and 

so and it's been a very successful experiment for us so that's kind of how i would approach 

it um and i also tied it into our our southwest values you know we are we're the low-cost 

airline and so cost is always something that we're very focused on um so i approached it from that 

perspective as well you know explaining you know this is a way for us to potentially bring in really good talent 

at a lower cost and um so that really resonated with the people on my team 

okay um okay um so 

there was another question about upskilling if someone wants to take this you know with regards to upskilling how do you deal 

with those that don't want to give up primary roles to make a change what would you say to encourage them 

that some people are just not going to want to change you know people are always different on 

their on their uh on the change uh curve right um some people are very 

get used to change very quickly and they won't have a problem with it uh some are very resistant um you gotta 

spend a little more time with them and there comes a time where you're just going to have to tell them this is the way we've got to 

do it i have to have more than one person who knows this system 

so i can't it can always be you you'll never be able to take a vacation um if you for some reason left the 

company we would you know it would be we'd be in a very bad state so 

um that at least helps them understand the why you know i'm not trying to necessarily replace you 

it's not that you're not doing a good job i need to have more than one person who knows this um and then then you just kind of have 

to force it you um you make the org change if necessary to 

get that person out of that role and a new person in that role and you want to do that before you have 

to make the change so that when somebody decides to leave or just moves to a different team in 

your company you're not suddenly in a lurch with no one to know that system 

i would also add to to that that you know i think it's good for you to 

find out why they're not wanting to give up their primary role is it resistance to change or 

is it maybe not having the time to do it if it's time to do it it's probably cheaper to reskill them 

than to find somebody else so can you carve out dedicated time to them that they can 

leverage to to make that shift um and barring all other reasons 

within i think we would probably all agree that money is important and so one of the things that that we 

think a lot about at att is compensation transparency and so 

every title uh is published so if you go look at the the um 

we call them target salary ranges if you go look at the target salary ranges based on where you are physically 

located because costs are different in different geo zones if you look at your title or a title 

that you might want to get into those are differentiated and you can go 

see you know gee if i want to get a little bit more money i probably should think about doing an upskill or 

doing a reskill so that i can continue to have salary growth and so 

i hope that helps thank you both so i think last question 

because we're getting um near the hour is um what do you see as the buy versus build 

pros and cons of of you know bringing this talent into your 

organizations and and um i'll start with tara on this one i actually think that there are pros and 

cons to both so from my perspective you know just to define what i i consider build verse buy so 

buy is you know going to the market and finding the person that perfectly fits that 

job that you're looking to fill i think for many of us that have been in hiring for a long time people tend to see someone leave their 

team and they're like okay i would like the exact replica of that human and then they go to their hr team and they're like here's this crazy laundry 

list of technical skills and experiences and um you you sit there and you go okay so 

on the buy side if i try to go buy that does that human exist maybe 

what are the chances i get it what is the market rate and you start to see the cons of that generally pretty quickly right but there 

certainly are situations where that might be you know based on team dynamics based on um you know the the tenure of your team 

etc etc that that is the solution that needs to be considered in certain situations 

so the the pros of that are obviously that you bring someone in that has a theoretically a lot lower ramp time and 

they're able to contribute and certainly if they're in a leadership or a tech lead role you know they bring a lot of those those 

skills that we need to help facilitate that team the build pros though 

are a lot of things that chris said and it's a lot of what i see in my program too is that we get to dictate the skills that 

we need we get to build the skills that we need and in the way that we want our people to build their 

skills they come often times even if they're career changers 

into tech without a lot of the bad habits that can be taught at other 

organizations right so it's whether they're you know a new college grad or someone that's just making their 

first pivot into engineering for me i see that they're they're like a clean slate and we're able to really help them build 

and adjust and define their skill set as as it best suits us so 

from my perspective there's a lot of pros to building your talent base versus 

trying to consistently go out to market and try to find these needles in a haystack 

um the other you know pro of the build in my perspective is that you can often get 

someone doing work faster um and will it be the same level 

of work as you might have gotten from getting that you know five seven ten fourteen year person no 

but you might spend six eight ten months looking for that one person 

and if you could have just brought in that that new fresh face that was excited to 

to learn how that continuous learning mindset was ready to just grab on to what you've got 

they could make some pretty shocking and significant value ads during that time right so um 

granted i'm biased because i've worked in the the university recruiting and the what i'll call the build space for a 

long time i just think there's a there's certainly situations where you you need 

that experience but there's a lot of really amazing benefits that come with being open to new talent and being 

willing to invest in them because you can really reap returns on that investment 

okay anyone else want to comment on sure okay um yeah i totally agree with 

tara i mean you obviously there are lots of times where you just have to get in that get that experienced person in the door because 

that's what you need on your team um but uh the huge benefit that i've 

seen to to building up new talent from within um you get a you get movement on your team 

you get some upward momentum on your team um i like to use an analogy 

of a of a pond versus a lake um if your team is like a pond it's kind of stagnant 

right it's you got no movement in no movement out even if you're replacing 

one person with a new person they're the exact same kind of person right and so your team kind of stagnates 

there's not a lot of growth so what i'd like to do on my teams is to 

make sure that we've always got some movement going on we've got some young people who are growing up and 

those those older more experienced tech leads they're focused on building up those 

people so that they can move on to something bigger and better in their career so you want that movement like in a lake 

where you got a river flowing in and a river flowing out so that's a huge benefit to everyone on 

the team your young people are getting that experience your older people are mentoring they're showing that they 

know how to build people which is obviously a skill that they need to have when they move up to the 

next level so yeah i definitely agree with tara that the building 

is is hugely important for your team okay great well we 

are uh nearly at the hour and so um i think we we need to start wrapping 

up i don't know if there was any last-minute 30-second comment anybody wanted to to make or if there was any question 

that would be helpful for us we'll make sure that we answer questions this 

event is being recorded and that will be sent out and certainly you can contact myself 

too if you need a a copy of the recording but that's really all the time we have 

for today and i want to thank again tracy haver and chris hightower and tara weiborny for 

joining us and giving us their time today and i hope that you all enjoyed it and we look 

forward to getting together again for another interesting panel discussion 

so thank you everyone and have a great day