Elena Vartas Enabling Digital Transformation through a Culture of Continuous Learning: Fostering Talent Development within the Organization Apply to Speak (91232)

Elena Vartas
Head of Learning and Development, Americas

Video Transcription

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. Hello, welcome to the session. I think I will give another minute or so for more people to join us. So we will begin in just 10 to 15 seconds. Thank you. Happy to see more and more people. OK?I think that we can start. I hope that those who will join us uh a bit later will catch up. So uh today, I would like to share with you uh how we at EPA system, the company that I will share more details with you about foster talent development within and outside of the organ, thus enabling digital uh transformation through culture of continuous learning. And first of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Elena Varte. I come with pedagogical education and over seven years of experience in corporate training industry. I am currently based in the US Philadelphia where I relocated a while ago from Belarus. I'm really passionate about um uh helping individuals and organizations um uh reach their full potential through effective talent development programs, which actually led me to become the head of uh learning and development in Americas at EAS system and talking about a system.

We are a multicultural um software engineering company uh with more than 50,000 employees across the globe. Our company is one of the leading sponsors of this conference. If you haven't had yet a chance to visit our booth, I encourage you to do so to hear more details about what we do for our, our employees, for our clients and importantly for our external communities as well. I don't want to take much of your time now to discuss all the wonderful work that a uh does. But I wanted to uh stay a little at um uh at our mission. So what is A's mission? Uh This is how our company positions itself on the market. We are consultants, designers, engineers, architects and trainers who enable our customers um uh to be competitive and disruptive in the marketplace through innovative technology solutions while helping them to successfully navigate through multiple waves of technology change.

So this is the statement that is available on our website for everyone. And I would say in my humble opinion, this is quite an ambitious promise to our clients. Uh We only can help our clients be competitive and disruptive and navigate all those waves of changes only if we stay competitive, disruptive and if we can navigate those changes. And I can assure you that we are that company, we are competitive and disruptive and we can navigate the waves of all those changes. And why are we can we do that and we can actually do that in more than 50 countries across the globe. Uh So we are uh competitive and successful everywhere. And the answer I see. And for me, it is an easy answer is that a is an education company uh for since 1993 AM has leveraged with uh advanced software engineering engineering heritage to become the foremost global digital transformation services provider. We are leading the industry in digital and physical product development and digital platform engineering services. The our innovative strategy through our consultancy and uh integrated advisory through our design capabilities and through our unique engineering DNA. And I will be using that engineering D DNA not once today.

Uh We uh we at EPA have globally deployed uh hybrid teams all across the world to make the future real for our clients, for our communities to help them stay um uh like powered in the market uh by providing better enterprise education and health platforms that connect people that optimize their experiences and simply make their life easier.

Uh with the initiatives Global Campus, the initiative that I'm going to talk to you about today, we invest significantly in creating a continuous learning culture, not only for our employees, but for our clients, for future ecommerce, for external audience, for our external communities.

And we hope that this initiative uh helps to stay ahead of the rapid evolution of uh the tech industry. And um I suggest us now have a closer look at what this global A campus is, what it can offer to those who are inside of a and those who are outside of it. So the global uh A campus is actually a new breed of software engineering education. Uh Our programs blend online on the gaunt content with live in person experiences that are developed by our internal practitioners with hands on experience. We make sure that all the education that we provide to external or internal audience is always pra has always practical focus.

Uh We all know that people learn best by doing something. That's why our programs are designed to be centered on a series of internships that later lead up to employment and hands on uh learning from practitioner experts from our production prepares the students uh to the real world challenges. At the same time, we make sure that our education is learner centered uh a Global campus uh blends scalable online content with learning advisors and encourages uh and gives a lot of opportunities to meet people, to make friends and to expand your uh network. Everything is powered on our proprietary platform that creates an optimal student experience. So students uh uh study uh virtually online, they collaborate with peers, they come together for practice for socialization. So we design a full learning journey uh which responds to the learning needs of every single learner and talking about our learners about our audience. Uh A global campus will address the learning needs of various audiences regardless of whether you are just starting your career or maybe you already have deep, deep expertise or maybe you would want to drive a change for your business.

We have a wide variety of programs to support any of these aspirations. We have programs for kids. We have programs for youth and seniors. We have available solutions for prospective learners and for academic partners. We provide training to employees, to prospective employees and to our current employees.

And at the same time, we provide training to our customers as well to our uh to our clients. And before we jump uh more into the uh solutions into those programs that we offer. I wanted to um to, to, to describe a little why is that, that those audiences, those students of ours choose a and why we encourage you also to look into our training solutions and see if you can benefit from them. So uh uh E A in our opinion, provides next generation skill development because we are shaping the technical communities of the future and you can gain those needed marketable skills to work and lead in technology driven future. While connecting with the global community of learners of practitioners and experts. We are building so hard, this wide network of experts. And uh you will get a access to that at the same time, at a we believe that you learn for life, not just for school. Uh you can continually advance your career through inman skills and team based projects. With our proven approach of mixing lessons with personal mentorship, you always have a mentor in your learning journey and uh we help engineer your future your way because our uh we tailor our programs to your aspirations.

Our programs bring together uh world class instruction and practice experience to help you solve all the complex real world engineering and innovation changes. So this is why we believe that the education that is provided by EPA systems is really uh a world class education. And uh there can be tons of words to describe all those benefits. But I prefer numbers. I think that numbers speak for themselves. And this is what I have put together to show some of the key numbers. Uh about our educational services. We have decades of experience uh which started in 2004. We have educated hundreds of thousands of learners and almost all of them have a look, almost 95% would recommend the course or the program that they have taken to their peers, to their family uh or um uh to their friends. Besides that, we are really proud that uh we uh we, we have achieved, we have been recognized with a number of international awards for our Learning Solutions. So I will give just an extra 5 to 1010 seconds for you to dive deeper into those numbers. And uh later, we will go into the products that we have available for external and internal uh audience.

So, talking about the uh global campus and uh it is the, it is formed by six like we can call them divisions of blocks of programs or domains, whichever word you prefer most. Uh I will cover every one of them in just a uh overview to get the idea what the program entails. So we have Engineering uh School of Digital Engineering. We have upskill elevate learning and development department, executive leadership development and a block uh for Children.

So and I start, I suggest that we start with the EPA School of Digital Engineering, which is an umbrella brand for academic degree programs that EPAM rolls out in several countries, partnering with local academic institutions for many years. A cooperated with local universities in many countries to train and then hire their graduates having this particular experience and as well. Having more than 800 phds in a stuff gives us real strong confidence that pen can develop and can deliver innovative practical oriented degree programs in software engineering.

And based on our deep engineering expertise and our experience in learning, designing uh in le in designing learning solutions. A school of digital engineering equips students with the skills they need to successfully land an engineering job after graduation. So talking about target audience who do we um target here here. It's all about external audience, not hammers for prospective students we have bachelor's degree programs for students who already have basic it knowledge or those who have Bachelor of Science in computer science.

We have master's degree programs and also we have po uh postgraduate students are more than welcome to use our lifelong learning courses. So uh these are the three level of audiences that we target and talking about the results. I will just mention the most recent ones in 2022 Less than a year ago, uh we started three new a schools with universities. Uh The first one is it Park University in Uzbekistan. We also launched a schools in European Humanity University in Lithuania, Vilnius and an American University in Kiev Ukraine. So currently a total of about 500 bachelor's undergraduate students um uh taking uh our bachelor's programs for master's programs. We have more than 100 students in countries like Eastern Europe uh countries from Eastern Europe, Turkey and Georgia for the lifelong learning courses. It is also certifications and other non degree programs. Uh We are starting down with many leading universities now in Ukraine, Poland and Georgia.

And we are targeting to expand to Latin in America as well. So this is the first block of our educational solutions for external audience. The next one is upscale, uh the next level is upscale pro the here we talk about boot camps and certifications. Uh It is uh needless to say, I think that refresher courses and new credentials are a constant and permanent part of a modern it career now. And with our programs, you can choose to upskill yourself to the next domain or progress your career path uh within your current domain through advanced certifications. Um up to you achieve your next career adventure and upskill or Upskill Pro is the program, the block of programs that can help you with that. It is a series of boot camps and cer uh and certifications developed to provide training opportunities for individuals who are looking to start or to continue developing a career in the field of information technology. So who is our target audience here? Again, external audience.

Again, everyone who is uh who is not part of E A is welcome to take advantage of these courses. Uh We provide training to it career switchers or to it specialists with all with various uh expertise levels who wants to master their skills. So thus we have boot camps for beginners and boot camp camps for uh for professionals. So this particular program, we actually have specific objectives or targets that we aim to achieve while driving this program. And what are those? First of all, we want to become a self sustainable and scalable source of talents for our company for a worldwide. Besides that, we will we develop comprehensive educational programs to meet with growing it demand. And mo most importantly, we create a growing network of experts who are ready to share their knowledge and skills within the company outside of the company. Just to share knowledge as is. Uh so this program upscale and upscale Pro are is available in various countries like the United States, Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. And just listen what disciplines are actually part of these programs. There are a lot, it is business analysis, a development.net development front and node Js test automation solution architecture, cloud devops, Android, I can talk for more and more. So all these disciplines are covered by this program.

So you can find a course or a program that would um meet your interests. The format that this program is being delivered is B two C and B two B like business to business as well when we partner with nonprofit organizations. So uh there will be more countries added to this particular portfolio. Uh And yeah, like uh this is one of the mo like most inspiring programs. Lot of programs that we have. The next one that I wanted to stop at is uh elevate. Uh This is our um uh how to say it. The uh this is where we train uh postgraduate students and prepare them for our uh internal production. This is education to career service. Uh It enables uh the post the graduates, the recent graduates uh to obtain the practical and elevated skills across different tools, technologies and software development processes that are required for the most desired it careers and it uh it provides that it would just within a couple of months, 3 to 4 months in some of the disciplines.

It is uh a global grand scale educational service that assists beginners of various ages and various professional backgrounds uh to start the it career, the same as in previous ones, it is available for external audience. So we are not targeting here, hammers, it is all for people who are outside of a we work with students and graduates of technical universities and also provide training to specialists in experienced in other industries, not in it who decided actually to switch to it. So this will be our audience here who elevate with these programs. We collaborate with local universities. We provide free open training courses to everyone. We arrange a levels laboratories and uh help to adapt to project work. Talking about a labs about our laboratories. This is where junior engineers get advanced technology trainings, um uh get adaptation to the company and what is very important, get their first hands on experience in a constant in person, uh in person, contact with their mentor with their engineers from our production. Traditionally, this lab stage would last 2 to 3 months to prepare a junior specialist, to be ready to be to join a real life uh production project and to supply skill ready junior specialists to our labs in most of the markets in most of the countries elevate. This block of programs runs external courses in more than 20 disciplines, the ones that I have mentioned before, Java Javascript Q A devos.net and many more so basic and advanced skill development usually takes up to 3 to 6 months with uh uh to students with technical and maths background and a bit over nine months for switchers who have either a weak it background or need to restore their basic level of um uh it uh expertise, let's say after a graduation, a while ago, currently elevate though their programs are uh o rating in more than 20 countries of A's presence.

And uh these programs supply 2 to 5000 junior engineers to a projects to our production use uh uh units annually. So this is a great source of junior engineers for our company as well. The next department that I would like to stop and to, to share you what we do here is our corporate learning and development department, which is actually near and dear to my heart because this is the department that I belong to in our company. So learning and development function takes care of our uh of the learning needs of our employees across all the units, across all the disciplines and geographies of a more than 50 countries. Our learning ecosystem is always aligned with the strategy of our enterprise of the whole company and it connects talents to the needs of the organization and to the needs of the business. Uh our L and D department helps employee in all locations achieve professional goals through valuable learning opportunities. So this offering this one of all the six se uh sections that I am covering is just for e commerce, this is for our employees. And according to the industry reports, uh companies with a robust learning um culture are 30% more likely to stay competitive on the market in the long term.

And we are really lucky that A's top management understands that this is business imperative and uh they see learning as a critical investment and with their robust executive support. Uh Our corporate L and D offers an extensive choice of learning uh solutions grouped around 4 million major competences for major buckets. First, of course, this is the engineering portfolio to nurture our historically strong engineering background, as I mentioned before, we call it engineering DNA, as well as we enable ineffective communication between teams between EPA and clients through our soft skills courses.

Uh We also invest a lot into the development of our managers uh to our leaders to make sure that they get these leadership skills uh necessary to manage the teams and to manage the delivery of our projects. And plus, we also have an in house school of language. We uh train several languages in different countries and all those offering is available for our internal audience for eamer. The next block of programs that I wanted to cover is our executive leadership development. Uh I think everyone would agree that today's successful companies require leadership that actually transcends traditional management disciplines. Now, data and A I uh literacy, uh creativity, agility and ability to recognize those transformation, transformation opportunities. These are the critical skills that are required for leaderships today.

And with the help of our award-winning leadership development programs, uh we can help your executives embody and lead change initiatives through a unique combination of training through uh practical tasks and implementation advisory. So who do we target? Here? Here we are talking about our clients.

All these programs for executive uh leadership educations are available for the leadership teams of pas clients. And here we have uh we target uh core focus areas like it executive education to equip the it leaders with the digital data and leadership skills to drive those strate strategic changes in the company. Uh We also uh provide digital readiness program. Uh We provide practitioner development program programs around how to attract, develop and retain best talent in the company as well as data literacy program. So all that award-winning programs are available for our customers and delivered by our internal uh subject matter experts like from, from our production.

And last but definitely not least I wanted to share with you what we do for kids at a. We are really passionate about um engineers who want to share their knowledge, their expertise with younger generations. And that's why we invest a lot into creating those learning opportunities for these audience, this important audience as well. Um I think it's needless to say that investment in a children's education uh always pays the best interest in terms of our collective future. Ip a global it educational programs for kids are currently being implemented in more than 20 countries of the company's presence, which is really a lot. Our global educational programs um encourage Children and youth from age 8 to 18 to explore software development, to develop necessary skills and proficiencies.

And uh importantly, pursue that lifelong learning that is so important in life. Uh We uh we uh provide the age appropriate environment to pick children's interest in in technology. We always incorporate Gamification elements in our educational solutions and share hands on experience again through mentoring.

So even for our kids programs, we always incorporate mentoring in our solutions. So we're really passionate about sharing this uh engineering DNA with our future uh with our like growing generations here. I wanted to add that the kids programs uh are delivered. Yeah, in more than 20 countries.

Uh in most of the cases, these are the kids of hammers, who our audience here. So we deliver these programs to the uh to the to the to the kids of our employee employees or to the closest closest communities. But some countries differ. They open, they open this um offering to a wider of uh audience. But what is important? We have created courses, train the trainer for kids that is available online to everyone. And I will share you with you where you can find them. So you can uh have a look, you can take those trainings. And if you are interested, we can help you to start this kind of initiative in your family, in your community or in your company. So all those courses are available for you as well and talking about where you can actually find all that um implementation of all those learning programs that I have mentioned uh would never be available uh to, to deliver at scale without certain technology. And at EPA M uh uh we have invested a lot in the our education platform and we have been doing that for many years now, creating its own components and its own tools and integrating the past open source technologies, the learning platform we simply call it learn uh gives a seamless experience.

It's really a uh one stop shop platform that supports everything right from your enrollment up to exponential sessions, from exploring content to peer interaction. The offer uh the platform offers a range of features including um course creation, uh manage, of course management tools.

Uh It also gives you student analytics discussion forums. Uh It supports the curation of content from various vendors. Uh It also helps different business functions within the company to build their own learning courses, to help to onboard people, to new projects, to new accounts, to, to new assignments So this is all available. Thanks to our platform, learn.a.com and I want you to remember this, this name learn.a.com, even though it is our internal tool to track our learning activities internally. And this is the platform that we use for our external training. This platform is always also available to public.

Go there, create your account and browse. We have opened a big variety of courses to the public. They are all free of charge. They cover technical skills, soft skills. Um uh They are all in self based format. This is where you can actually find, they train the trainer for heat programs. So uh remember that explore and I hope that you can find something interesting and something inspiring for you or for your company there as well. So this is basically everything that uh I wanted to share with you today. Thank you very much for being here. I was really happy to share with you what we do uh in terms of uh learning to uh to uh so that our employees, clients and importantly our um uh communities, our network could benefit from if you are interested in some of more details about the programs that I have mentioned or would want to ask some questions.

I have left here the uh website, a Global campus.com. This is where you can go and find more detail. Importantly, you will find there. Also the uh tab for asking questions, send your question to us. Um uh you can ask more detail, you can have more specific questions. So whatever you have in mind and the respective team from this or that program will reach out to you directly to provide you the answers as soon as they can. So this is actually everything that I wanted to share with you today. I'm just trying to see what if we have any more time for the Q and A. So I will stop sharing the screen and we'll go on camera and I see that we still have a couple of minutes. So maybe there are people who have any questions and I will be happy to answer them. Did a couple of, thank you in the chat. Thank you very much. I hope that you find it inspiring and that you can find something that will help you achieve your professional and development goals. What is the program that you are most proud of? Uh So I have referred several times to the mentoring component that we have in each single program that we have.

Initially, we launched this program at EPA manager mentoring program where we have um uh recruited, I would say more than 1000 of managers available to mentor our colleagues, our peers all across the globe within the company. The pro the program is really outstanding and has terrific results.

And we now incorporate this Mandarin component in every single program outside of the company as well. So I would say that. Yeah, manager's program manager, Mandarin program is something that I'm really proud of and I'm really proud that I A has it. Thank you for the question.

Thank you. Remember if you come up with any question later? This is a global campus.com. This is where you can send your questions. We will send you a reply as soon as we can. Also, you are more than welcome to reach out to me on linkedin. Um Also, we can provide you all the answers and consult you about all the possibilities that we have across the globe. Thank you very much. I see that we don't have any questions left. I will stay here for just five more minutes of the time in case someone would join and ask the question and um until further meetings with you and hopefully soon online offline, wherever we can meet, uh let's all grow, let's succeed together. Thank you very much for all your attention today.