Baillie Gifford is an investment management firm that is wholly owned by 44 partners, all of whom work within the firm. The company officially started using Cloud Academy with a small team back in September 2019, and after multiple account expansions, has since expanded across numerous teams throughout the organization.
Baillie Gifford is adamant about investing into its employees' learning and development, and providing its staff with the right tools to be successful in their roles—not just for today, but for the future.
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540%
Increase in overall skill profile scores
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199%
Improvement in Microsoft Azure domain expertise
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187%
Increase in AWS domain expertise
Challenge
Being a multi-cloud organization, the firm needed to acquire new skills across different domains as it adopted Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform in its business. The firm is committed to upskilling its technical workforce to address all of its IT and Cloud requirements.
With a multi-cloud business strategy, the challenge for Baillie Gifford was the various levels of experience and capabilities across the technology division. With many different preferences in cloud technology, the firm also needed a seamless and scalable solution to meet everyone’s needs.
With everyday business and project commitments, Baillie Gifford previously found it difficult to upskill its current teams without taking them out of the office environment or disrupting their day-to-day work.
Cloud Academy was brought in to not just help them with their online learning and training requirements, but to also facilitate a digital transformation and culture shift while helping them achieve their personal development goals.
“The content within Cloud Academy has been enthusiastically received by our IT Professionals and Application Developers. Many of them have used the platform to not only arm themselves with the knowledge and skills required to tackle projects within our infrastructure, but to also prepare for the successful attainment of professional qualifications through vendors such as Microsoft.” – Russell Glencross, IS Talent & Development Lead
Solution
Cloud Academy provided a programmatic solution to predictably upskill Ballie Gifford’s teams, as well as a flexible and convenient delivery method to consume learning.
With Cloud Academy, Baillie Gifford has adopted a Learn-Do-Validate model. Its employees “learn” through our courses, “do” through our unique hands-on labs, and “validate” their knowledge through the extensive exams.
“We are delighted at how Cloud Academy has provided us with on-demand access to such high-quality technical content, and view it as a particularly prudent investment in the development of our people’s skills.”
The platform allows the firm to assign learning paths to individuals or teams based on job roles or project teams. Progress is now easily tracked and reported with feedback on how competency is increasing. This gives managers an opportunity to further identify skill gaps within the teams and to plan accordingly.
The platform has made it possible for Baillie Gifford to identify and build its true cloud practitioners and has given the firm the opportunity to map its staff into a variety of new roles and career opportunities.
Outcome
Within just a few months of using Cloud Academy, The Baillie Gifford team has completed over 330 hours of cloud training, which resulted in a tangible ROI and over 24 certifications obtained. This not only showcases the firm’s commitment to upskilling across multiple cloud vendors, but also the alignment between the Cloud Academy Training Plans and the firm’s business requirements.
Since beginning this journey with Cloud Academy, Baillie Gifford has achieved the following results:
- Overall: 540% increase in the team’s overall skill profile
- Microsoft Azure: 199% increase in the team’s knowledge on Azure concepts, domains, and expertise
- Amazon Web Services: 187% increase in the team’s knowledge on AWS concepts, domains, and experts
“Cloud Academy has allowed Baillie Gifford to pivot the technical skillsets of many of our IT Professionals to meet the demands of our emergent DevOps environment and our growing use of cloud technologies. Having access to Cloud Academy and the associated support from the Customer Success team has allowed critical learning to continue unaffected throughout the recent extended period of lockdown and working from home which would have previously been impossible.”
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