Developing a technical career path through the Enterprise Engineer Programme
Overview
In 2008, Markets Technology launched an innovative development programme to recognise their outstanding engineering talent, enable them to develop their technical careers and become the technology leaders of the future.
Markets Technology values technical excellence and the opportunity to have an outstanding technical career.. The Enterprise Engineer Programme (EEP) equips our top engineers with the skills required to take an enterprise-wide approach to delivering technical solutions. Equally important, through the shared learning and problem-solving experience, it creates a collaborative culture of engineering excellence and improvement.
Impact
The EEP creates and supports superior engineering, an enterprise-wide mindset, commercial acumen and personal effectiveness, all of which directly benefit both the business and the participants.
This is a high-profile programme within Technology, which has gained buy-in across the whole organisation. It has surpassed stakeholder expectations and proven to be a huge success as a number of the team assignments have been adopted by the business and turned into real projects with demonstrable benefits. Material developed for the EEP has been widely used throughout the organisation.
Innovation
The organisational revolution that this programme has delivered is the creation of an outstanding cohort of engineering talent, who understand how to collaborate and share their collective knowledge to deliver the technology solutions of the future. We have managed to develop our technical leadership to the degree that we have created a new title recognising the pinnacle of the engineering career, that we call the Distinguished Engineer. The EEP has become the breeding ground for this new leadership role.[/one_half_last]
Insight
As Technology’s flagship development programme, considerable resources and effort have gone into getting it right and make sure that the programme hits all its targets. The programme team started by identifying the capabilities expected of an EEP graduate and then performed a gap analysis against potential candidates to create an outline curriculum. Over the years we have learnt some valuable lessons and evolved the course; the principal lesson being to focus on the people skills that the engineers need over the technical content. The greatest catalyst for success after the programme was in equipping the engineers in how to operate in a business context where engineering, whilst key, is only of the aspects to consider in working with others and building outstanding solutions.
Inspiration
Markets Technology has approximately 4,500 staff members worldwide and was faced with the challenge of rewarding and progressing star performers who didn’t wish to proceed through the traditional managerial career path. Recognising and embracing the fact that different people have different strengths, Technology created a programme that provides the opportunity to our top engineering talent to carve out a technical leadership career and capabilities, culminating in the pinnacle of the Distinguished Engineer title.[/one_half_last]
Speakers
Jeremy Wilks
RBS
Jeremy Wilks has more than fifteen years’ experience in capital markets covering project delivery, architecture, software engineering and training. He is currently Head of Engineering and Infrastructure Services at RBS Markets responsible for development methodology and the supporting toolset as well as a project to deliver a private cloud capability. He was one of the original team that developed the EEP and has delivered significant portions of it every year.