Over the course of 2024 and into 2025 in my role at T5 Digital we partnered with Inara Talent to explore the topic of “Where do we draw the line at potential” through the Leaders Lab Series.

We explored the topic with 3 events:

• A roundtable to discuss the problem and unearth challenges
• Workshops to discover solutions to the challenges
• A Q&A on the findings

The Roundtable

Through conversation with leaders from around Manchester, we identified the following challenges:

• Helping younger people learn how to work in a professional setting
• Upskilling on the job for mid-seniors making a technology change—skills
• Delivery Pressure—can’t upskill someone whilst delivering
• Lacking Line Management/Mentoring Skills
• Uncertainty around Neurodivergent colleagues
• Getting support/buy-in from other leaders
• Short term vs long term finances and the implications of that on your structure
• Remote/hybrid working
• AI and the Future of Work: The potential of AI in the workplace and its impact on team composition and job roles were explored

The workshop

We grouped these challenges into four topics for the following workshop. This was designed to have the attendees help us solve the problem, as well as a unique opportunity to grill Mark Crossfield who has many years experience developing early careers engineers into senior engineers, from a variety of backgrounds.. We had groups with an intentional mix of the following in order to get diversity of thought when solving the problems. 

• Neurodivergent Tech Talent: Help or Hindrance for Project Delivery?
• Building the Future: Strategies for Senior Leaders to Secure Buy-in and Investment in Early Careers in Tech
• Balancing delivery and taking on early careers
• Case Study from AutoTrader

Neurodivergent Tech Talent: Help or Hindrance for Project Delivery?

Parul Singh ran an interactive session, a little like “Play your cards right”, to help get people into the right frame of mind with facts and context before exploring the question. Here are the main takeaways.

• Neurodivergent (ND) professionals, especially in early careers, bring unique strengths and mentoring capabilities, which benefit project delivery.
• Misconceptions persist that ND individuals are “more work,” but supporting them yields significant positive outcomes, including improved delivery and team dynamics.
• Practical solutions include leveraging ERGs, promoting universal accessibility, and ensuring visible senior leadership advocacy.
• Ethical considerations and lived experiences of ND individuals within organisations are invaluable in shaping inclusive practices.

Building the Future: Strategies for Senior Leaders to Secure Buy-in and Investment in Early Careers in Tech

Alastair McGeoch, Director of Software Engineering at Roku, hosted our round table and was particularly interested in this subject as he is growing his team in Manchester. As a senior leader, Alistair had several insights and challenges he wanted to explore at the strategic and executive level.

• Stability: Tech’s recent instability requires a long-term commitment for early career programs to be effective.
• Underestimating Talent: Early career professionals are often undervalued, leading to misconceptions about their impact on teams.
• Cultural Transformation: Success depends on fostering a growth-oriented culture and securing executive sponsorship for early career initiatives.

Balancing delivery and taking on early careers

I explored this topic and gathered the following recommendations.

• Embed a culture of junior support at all levels, across disciplines, and ensure leadership alignment.
• Use external consultants for short-term knowledge boosts and create clear, context-specific frameworks for roles.
• Present data-driven cost-benefit analyses to demonstrate the value of multi-level teams to budget holders.

Case Study from Auto Trader

Mark Crossfield, formerly of AutoTrader, brought his years of experience as a Developer Coach so that workshop attendees could ask him questions, rather than help the workshop organiser solve their problem. This was billed as “Cultural Transformation: Success depends on fostering a growth-oriented culture and securing executive sponsorship for early career initiatives.”

• Data is essential for decision-making and proving the impact of early career initiatives.
• Mixed-experience squads improve engineering output, culture, and community.
• Senior leadership buy-in is critical to the success and scalability of support systems.

Conclusions

This is a topic that can easily explode into myriad potential reasons why organisations and teams are reluctant to hire folks who aren’t ready to hit the ground running, and countless solutions to them. Very succinctly the main takeaways were:

• Do the hard work to set up a complete Engineering Progression framework for your organisation, and make your life so much easier going forward.

• Invest in this structure and track progress against the structure and regularly review.
• Get buy-in from executive sponsors, including finance and HR to bring together that long-term strategy. We do it for the tech, leaders also need to do this for the people.

The detailed report to follow contains a number of additional initiatives and a much deeper dive.