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CEO perspective – 2020 in review
Our CEO, Geoff Smith reflects on his first year leading the Grayce community.
"Whilst 2020 has been a year that none of us could have predicted, it’s also been a year where people have built on their own resilience and adaptability. As we near the end of 2020, I'm reflecting on Grayce’s year, and my first 11 months at the helm as CEO.
Like many organisations, we’ve adapted to home working and making sure that everyone is geared up to work effectively. As multiple industries have been affected by interrupted trading due to lockdowns and tier restrictions, we’re feeling incredibly privileged to find ourselves in a robust place and with additional growth in the year.
A Business with purpose
For us, as a business with purpose, what we do has never been more relevant. As the markets adapt and shift to this new working world, we have seen unemployment levels begin to rise. We have learned from previous recession economies that young people and their prospects are disproportionately affected. So we feel a keen responsibility and drive to make sure we can support this generation of young people as they begin their own careers.
This purpose that drives everything we do here at Grayce also shapes how we respond to market changes, and how we can add additional value for clients. As we bridge the gap between education and the world of work we can ensure that our clients are investing in the people that will lead their organisations in the future, whilst developing the new skills needed for the digital world we live in.
Building the future workforce, today
Grayce has traditionally focused purely on change and transformation, building talent pipelines for over 40 clients nationwide. The Development Programme that our people follow has seen many iterations over the past eight years as we responded to client demand.
This year has seen some truly exciting developments at Grayce as we build the future workforce, today and develop additional solutions to meet the needs of clients, incorporating new ways to add value and develop the leaders of the future.
Welcoming Doris to the Grayce family
In July, we announced that we would merge with early years talent consultancy, Doris. Doris has a background in tech and was founded by women wanting to inject diversity in to the tech space whilst providing real opportunities for young people.
As we’ve worked together to integrate the two businesses we’ve found a lot of similarities, in terms of our values but also in our culture and are bringing together both vibrant communities.
Doris has expanded our capabilities for our clients too, and as we evolve our businesses together we’re also looking at how we can best present a new technology offering for Grayce clients. We’re building out the Tech+ solution for clients so that we can enter in to software and application development, infrastructure and architecture spaces for our clients, using the great foundations both businesses have and our strong reputations for delivering quality.
2021 will be an important year as one business under the Grayce brand, and I’m looking forward to sharing more details with you as we progress our exciting plans.
Our Data+ solution
Developing these solutions and providing skills that organisations need has been a fundamental part of our strategy this year. We also launched our new Data+ solution for clients, aiming to build talent pipelines in data analysis and launch the careers of people looking to enter in to the data space and become experts.
We’ve partnered with industry experts, Turing Talent to build the solution that develops both technical skills in data analysis, visualisation, database management and more, whilst providing soft skills support aiming to give commercial context to our Analysts and provide clients with well-rounded professionals with the hard and soft skills needed to succeed.
We launched Data+ in September and have welcomed new cohorts of Analysts onto the Development Programme, deploying them on client site in insurance, financial services and legal to help build talent pipelines.
Our additional capabilities give us a good footing to start 2021, but also to provide #morechoices for our clients and to young people starting their careers. As we've adapted this year, we’ve welcomed 126 new colleagues. I’m incredibly proud of the work we do and what we offer and want to say a huge thank you to all of our clients for the support you give to our people and our business. Here’s to 2021!"
