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In this time of The Great Resignation, Xebia Academy and iO sat down together to come up with a plan to retain iO’s talent pool and attract new talent. One of the outcomes was that the tailored learning journey program enabled iO’s team to grow more rapidly than before. Explore how we collaborated closely with iO and learn about our journey toward setting up a successful custom learning program.

“It remains difficult to find good people in the market,” says Friso Geerlings, Technology Director at iO in Eindhoven. “Everyone is looking for communicative team players with a solid technical base.”
iO is an end-to-end agency with a growing team of experts in communication and digital transformation. With services in strategy, content creation, marketing, and technology, they work in a highly volatile digital market. One of the cornerstones of their success is the iO campus concept, a place where they can meet and exchange ideas with colleagues, clients, and partners, spread all over Europe.

Friso is in charge of the Technology service line; a team of engineers focused on creating tools to solve complex web and integration problems. Think about financial services and security-related projects, though their scope also extends to complicated e-commerce platforms that incorporate many other systems.

Currently, roughly 150 people work at the iO campus in Eindhoven, to design and run technical projects for airports, medical service providers, and financial institutions. Attracting talent remains a complex and universal problem, however. Demand is high, especially in the Eindhoven region. Unsurprisingly, iO needs more than 150 specialists to cope with its growth. That’s one of the multiple reasons why iO has chosen to invest even more in its people. More specifically: in jointly creating development programs for the talent pool that is already in-house.

Friso is in charge of the Technology service line; a team of engineers focused on creating tools to solve complex web and integration problems. Think about financial services and security-related projects, though their scope also extends to complicated e-commerce platforms that incorporate many other systems.

Currently, roughly 150 people work at the iO campus in Eindhoven to design and run technical projects for airports, medical service providers, and financial institutions. Attracting talent remains a complex and universal problem, however. Demand is high, especially in the Eindhoven region. Unsurprisingly, iO needs more than 150 specialists to cope with its growth.

Through this combination of gaining experience and following tailored training, Friso believes that, as they have already experienced, these talented juniors can handle more responsibility much sooner – more than you would expect from people who have just left school.
For example, Friso and his team saw that junior software developers, with their limited experience and only two rounds of training, were already at a level that would typically require someone with ten years of experience to reach. A challenging job for any recruiter to do.
“Our ambition is, therefore, to offer our employees (even) bigger learning journeys,” Friso continues. “To delve a bit more into simple analysis methods and customer understanding. We want to include training like Xebia Academy’s as a standard part of their personal growth and development plan.”

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