By Nancy Dahlberg
Strategio advocates for diverse early-career tech talent, giving them training and their first tech jobs while helping them advance with a major enterprise company. At the same time, the Miami-based startup fills a need for the enterprise businesses, becoming a reliable pipeline for skilled entry-level talent.
When we last connected with Strategio 14 months ago, the future of work startup had just raised its first funding and was a team of about four. The startup was preparing to launch the first cohort of its Strategio Simulator, an 8-week fulltime virtual training program that was a key component of its new staffing model.
Today, Strategio employs 47 people full time, and is onboarding another 25 this month. By the end of this year, the startup will have put 100 diverse early-career technologists through its simulator and into their first jobs in tech, said Strategio’s Founder and CEO, Conor Delanbanque.
Strategio has signed on six fortune 500 enterprises as clients since January and has four others in the pipeline closing soon. Delanbanque said he couldn’t disclose the names but that they are predominantly large financial services companies that have tens of thousands of employees.
“In the large enterprise world that they’re in, they still have the war on talent and the Great Resignation as two of the biggest problems that they’re trying to solve alongside the quiet quitting, that sort of disengagement,” Delanbanque said. “Strategio has done a really good job of finding these companies and then bringing in our early career talent program focused on underrepresented groups. We’ve got clients now saying okay, we want 25 people a month, scale our early career talent, build us up into the hundreds.”
Delanbanque says he hasn’t had any trouble finding great technologists either. Strategio partners with nonprofits and reaches out to minority serving universities. “Wherever they are, we want to speak to them and help them change their lives.”
Once a person has passed Strategio’s three stage selection process — a behavioral interview, a coding assessment and a technical interview — Strategio trains the talent in the skills enterprise clients seek its eight-week full-time program, paid for through $5,000 scholarships to lower the barrier of entry. The Strategio Simulator trains cohorts of 20-25 students at a time in the skills enterprise clients seek, such as cloud computing, data science, full-stack software development and cyberseucity. Some students enroll with computer science degrees in tow; others are self-trained, came through bootcamps or are entering the workforce after military service, for instance.
During the training, Strategio’s enterprise clients do meet and greets and interviews to select people that they want to hire, and then Strategio deploys these technologists to them. For the first two years on the job, they are Strategio employees with a competitive starting salary, plus health, dental vision, all paid by Strategio. After that, the technologist can join the enterprise company.
“It’s not just that companies struggle to find talent — we think the biggest problem is retaining the talent. You’ve got 56% retention of men in the in the workforce versus 38% for women,” Strategio’s training includes soft skills, including interviewing techniques and battling impostor syndrome.
At the same time, the US has very large populations that has been underrepresented in tech. Delanbanque cites these sobering US statistics:
- Women in tech: 28.8% representation
- Black and African-American women in Tech: 3%
- Hispanic and Latina women in Tech: 2%
- Total Black representation in Tech: 7%
“The win for our clients as they get to experience the Strategio technologists and the win for the technologist is they get the community of Strategio and all of our benefits and salary, and they also get on their resume experience at a Fortune 500 company,” said Delanbanque. “The client also invests their knowledge and their time to upskill and train these folks so it’s very much a strategic partnership.”
During those first two years, if extra training or certifications needed, Strategio provides that, Delanbanque said. Strategio also offers a sense of community for the technologies with events – from happy hours and bowling to yoga and mental health session. “This is not a short-term talent solution to plug a hole.”
Delanbanque, who is of British and Caribbean heritage and grew up in London, recently worked in New York City, where he held a variety of tech talent leadership and consulting roles, seeing the staffing issues first-hand. During the pandemic, he and his wife relocated to Miami. Delanbanque was named Forbes’ 2022 “30 Under 30” list in 2022.
93% of Strategio’s team of soon to be 72 is from historically underrepresented groups in tech — women, people of color, LGBTQ. veterans and neurodivergent, Delanbanque said. “We can’t solve those problems for clients and say, hey, we’re going to help with your diversity and your inclusion and your equity without doing it ourselves. We have absolutely built this whole company with so much intention right from day one.”
The team is dispersed in 10 states as well as Toronto and Montreal. Strategio recently launched in Canada. Strategio has raised $4.4 million in capital.
What’s ahead? “Instead of training a few hundred people, we want to start training a few thousand to make a more systematic change in the technology industry,” Delanbanque said, adding that he believes Strategio can train 400 in 2023 and grow from there. “But our business success is second to our core mission of uplifting and creating an inclusive tech workforce.”
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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