4 Ways One Tech Company Invests in Emerging Talent to Fill Key Roles and Its Leadership Pipeline

How do you solve a problem like the technical skills shortage? For technology company Edifecs, the answer is surprisingly straightforward: Edifecs became an educator for the skills they needed and started training technical talent even before they graduated from university.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts a global shortfall of 4 million developers by 2025. Today, filling open software engineer and IT positions is challenging — global staffing and recruiting firm ManpowerGroup reports 77% of employers have difficulty finding talent with the right blend of technical and soft skills. 

Adopting a skills-first talent strategy can help address this shortage. LinkedIn data shows that using a skills-first approach to talent can increase your talent pool by up to 10x. And there is a pool of untapped potential made up of recent graduates, overseas talent, and other overlooked candidates who are just waiting for employers to give them the chance and the training to succeed. 

Edifecs is a leading healthcare IT company based in Bellevue, Washington. It works to optimize healthcare data exchange between care providers and insurance companies — and to simplify and unify financial and clinical transactions. Founded in 1996 in a small room in the condo of Sunny Gurpreet Singh, a former software engineer and first-generation Indian immigrant, Edifecs now serves more than 290 million people and 350-plus healthcare customers.

Let’s explore four ways Edifecs has invested in training emerging talent to fill in-demand roles and bolster its leadership pipeline.

1. Edifecs recruits university talent and invests heavily in training

India is one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in the world. Over the last two decades, the country’s strong services exports, including information technology and software engineering, have grown exponentially, and experts predict that India’s tech industry will hit $500 billion in revenue in 2030, more than double the revenue in FY22.

Edifecs gets a jump on the competition by recruiting talent directly out of universities for its Punjab regional office.

Classes of up to 50 university students in professional services, IT, and software engineering — generally, evenly split between men and women — are hired at the start of their senior year. This group is onboarded for an internship and given several months of rigorous training during the last six months of their undergraduate studies and then hired full-time at Edifecs following graduation.

“When we’re bringing people in from college in India, we help them get up to speed on the healthcare industry,” says Katie Bunker, senior director of people and culture at Edifecs. “Then they get technical training including very product-specific training.”

And the results are notable — employees who go through this training program have higher rates of retention than experienced hires in the same positions. 

An internal software as a service initiative, coined “SaaSification,” further trains employees to support Edifecs in its transition from a middleware company to the cloud and SaaS. A custom learning path called “Understanding Cloud Fundamentals for Edifecs Associates” includes courses such as “Learning Cloud Computing: Core Concepts,” which highlights security considerations and typical day-to-day operations. The learning path also includes “Learning Docker,” which helps associates learn how to use and troubleshoot Docker, a piece of software that helps automate some of the DevOps engineers’ tasks. 

2. Edifecs offers soft-skill training alongside technical training to build well-rounded leaders 

Edifecs doesn’t stop at technical training. It emphasizes holistic skilling — promoting soft skills learning and career development training alongside hands-on training for hard skills. The top soft skills they’re teaching? Management and well-being.

“Managing and well-being are the two primary areas of focus right now,” Katie says. “If we get those right at the organizational level, we’ll have more effective, less stressed managers, who are enabling people, and their teams feel more engaged. And since the pandemic, people realize a focus on well-being is not a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.” 

Investing in leadership and management also helps your whole workforce. Studies have shown that team members who have leaders who inspire them are more likely to stay in their current jobs, and teams with leaders who take the time to teach are more resilient.

3. Edifecs leverages in-person and hybrid learning moments to give their distributed workforce opportunities for connection and well-being

Today there’s a need to keep employees feeling engaged and connected in a hybrid workforce. Before the disruption of COVID-19, Edifecs had 88% of its workers in the office. In 2023, Edifecs has 88% of their employees working remotely. To make the transition to remote work seamless, the Edifecs team set up training, tools, and tutorials on how to collaborate and manage distributed teams remotely.

New hires are asked to spend their first few months working in the office to build relationships face-to-face and to see more experienced people on the job. But after that, the company welcomes employees to work from anywhere. Edifecs embraces what it calls the “HPE” model: highly productive Edifecs. Through HPE, employees can work wherever they are most productive — even if that means that an employee isn’t frequently seen in the office. 

“People join organizations for career development,” Katie says. “It’s a big deal. Training is a very important part of it, but if you don’t have the flexibility in the post-pandemic world, if you don’t have the focus on well-being, if you don’t have the focus of inclusion, you’ll lose the benefit that you get by providing great career development.”

4. Edifecs encourages a robust learning culture through challenges and targeted skill-building

For many at Edifecs, it’s become a habit: If they need to learn something, they go to LinkedIn Learning, search, and find appropriate training. And managers are good about pointing their team members to resources when they need them.

Every couple of months, Edifecs sends out a LinkedIn Learning Challenge, a curated nano-learning course that they encourage all employees to take. It’s split into easily manageable five-minute lessons with some activities sprinkled in between. Employees who complete the learning paths are recognized in company-wide emails and are given kudos points in an online recognition platform. Those points can be converted into gift cards, concert tickets, or Edifecs-branded gear.

Edifecs is also continuously looking for skills gaps. It uses a targeted top-down approach. First, leadership looks at the organizational strategy and where the company is going. Then the team conducts an organizational-wide assessment and determines what skills are needed to achieve the company’s goals. If there are gaps, they determine how they are going to address them. 

“We don’t force anybody to learn only for the sake of learning,” Katie says. “We want our employees to learn because they want and need to. We’re very deliberate about what we want them to learn. So, if we’re asking them to learn something, there’s a reason for it, there’s timing around it, and it’s because our business needs it.”

Final thoughts

Today, the average shelf life of technical skills is about five years — and just 2½ years for very technical skills. This phenomenon is only amplified by AI: LinkedIn data shows that skills needed for jobs have changed by 25% since 2015, and are expected to change by 65% by 2030. 

Edifecs is very open with leaders and employees alike about how training, internal mobility, and career development can help them and the organization get ahead.

“Employees are seeing the same shelf life of skills that we’re seeing,” Katie says. “So, we just need to recognize it, talk about it, and make sure that employees can see that we’re continuing to offer them great development opportunities.”

The combined hard and soft skills training has bolstered their leadership pipeline and unlocked hidden talent pools within their own organization. Edifecs is reaping the myriad benefits of internal hiring and mobility — from preserving institutional knowledge to showing other employees that there is an opportunity for them to grow their careers and the business at the same time.

All open positions are posted internally at Edifecs, and employees are encouraged to view job boards. Those interested in internal moves can connect with their HR business partner, who then works with the TA team to consider the internal candidate. This strategy allows Edifecs to place their skilled talent where they need — or target learning to help those employees grow into new roles. Over the years, many Edifecs employees have relocated across departments, moved from India to the U.S., and advanced from pre-graduation intern to mid-level and senior leadership roles at the company.

“Our fundamental belief is that leadership starts with yourself,” Katie says. “So, even if you’re an individual contributor, you should still be looking at building core skills such as emotional intelligence. Only when you have a good sense of self can you move on to leading others.”