Empowering Global Talent with Ross O’Neill | KubeCon SLC 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're live here at Tech Well, we're live on Techron TV here at CubeCon in Salt Lake City.

Wrapping up our third day of coverage. I want to introduce you to Ross O'Neill. Ross is from Andela Ross.

First of all, welcome to Text Drunk tv. Thanks for being here, Man. Thanks for having me.

It's our pleasure. Um, Ross, before we get into Andela and announcements and the show here, you know, we were talking off camera, you're from Ireland, makes your Irish right? And Hundred percent Irish born bread.

A hundred percent Irish beef, As they say. But you're living in London? I am.

So there must be a story there. Yeah, There is. Um, so my background, yeah, I did computer science and university in Dublin.

Um, I worked for a number of years in the ed tech scene. Um, I then moved to London 'cause I was one of the first employees, uh, first like less than a hundred I'd say, at a Raspberry Pi. Sure.

If, you know, raspberry small. I know. Well, yeah.

Small, small computer. Um, and then, yeah, ended up working, uh, at Andela, which is a fully remote organization. Yes.

Really? Yeah. So it is, it's fully remote.

Fully Remote, yeah. How do you like that? How long have you been doing the fully remote thing?

Three Years. Yeah, three years. And then maybe there was an extra year on top of what?

Raspberry PI two, like two with the pandemic. When when we All went. Well, we were all remote then.

All remote then. Yeah. Excellent.

And, and what do you do with then d So Mandela, I am the senior manager of learning. We have a learning division that's concentrated on learning programs, upskilling certification. Um, so to give you a bit of context about Andela, Andela is like a private tech, uh, TA talent marketplace.

Mm-Hmm. So essentially if you're an eng uh, engineering manager, a CTO, and you're hoping to, uh, hire different talent from a board, a borderless force, you can connect with Andela, uh, in regards to finding the right person no matter where they are in the world. So we have over 150,000 technologists across 135 countries, and we can find, we have a andela talent, uh, cloud where you can, we can match according to your needs and requirements.

Um, Now are this, is this for full-time employment or contract Work? Uh, contingent roles? Yeah.

Contract role contracts. So, and we have, um, if depending, uh, multiple different types of organizations, uh, from, uh, large enterprise clients. Uh, like GitHub is a client of ours, uh, to small medium enterprise.

Wow, Very cool. Very cool. 150,000, uh, worldwide.

Yeah. And one of the reasons, uh, that it's very, very, um, attractive to engineering managers and CTOs within these organizations is they're trying, not just trying to find the right talent for the right skill that they have, where they're not just ac you know, traditionally speaking, they'll be accessing a constrained talent pool, the same market pool that's nearby their office, for example. Uh, but our, our talent is mainly in emerging markets.

So 60% of our talent marketplace is based in Africa. Okay. Um, so one of the best things that we always hear, um, one of the things I'm hearing at C**n is like, you know, we have a lot of great roles, but I'm not finding the right people.

And was like, well, have you considered, you know, uh, the emerging market and 'cause there's great talent there, great minds and, and they're very, uh, eager to learn and to get, get these opportunities. Sure. We matched them based on that.

That's fantastic. Fantastic. com.

com. Yeah. com.

Very cool. Yeah. Um, now let's talk about why you're here at CubeCon.

Yeah. You guys also had some announcements. Did, and let's jump into that.

Yeah. So, uh, we just recently at the keynote there, uh, along with Chris, uh, we are excited to launch a learning partnership with, uh, CNCF. Um, so Andela is around 10 years old.

Um, and part of our, you know, not just matching, uh, you know, our talent with jobs, we have a long legacy of upskilling and building learning programs, uh, for talent specifically in Africa. So this is kind of adding to this, uh, legacy of doing it. So we're gonna train around 20,000 to 30,000 talents, specifically in Africa, uh, in KCNA and CKAD.

And that's just the beginning of hopefully a very fruitful partnership, uh, over the next coming years. That's fantastic. Yeah.

And how, how's that being financed? Uh, so no cost to the talent, uh, CNCF and Mandela will are putting, uh, putting their, uh, uh, time, effort, Effort and equity. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's fantastic.

What a great thing, man. Yeah. And when you say Africa, look, Africa is the second largest continent in the world.

Most of our maps got it wrong because they don't have it, you know, in, in true size. Yeah. But Africa's a very, very large continent.

So when you say Africa, are we talking from top to bottom or top To bottom? Yeah, top to bottom. Um, um, but I would say a majority in terms of what we've seen through our learning programs.

We've trained over a hundred thousand technologists, um, to date. Um, we, that's around 15% of the developer workforce, uh, that currently exists around 700,000 recently reported in terms of software engineers and developers that exist in Africa. And in terms of, um, the areas, uh, that are growing, we would say a lot of talent will be applying from I would say Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, um, but it'll be open to a lot a the other countries as well.

Yeah. Excellent. Where can people, I imagine people can get more information both on CNCF and the anela website?

com if you're hoping to find talent, uh, you know, again, borderless completely remote, and you're, you're, uh, having it, you know, quite challenged to find the right person for that role. Um, definitely go on com. We definitely want hear from you.

If you wanna know more about our learning programs. As I mentioned, this is a, an add on of a legacy. We work with Google, Salesforce, a Ws, Microsoft over the last number of years.

com/learning and you can, and see about our partnership information of it from CCF as well. I love it. Excellent.

Um, Kemp, do you guys have never done a program like this before? I would imagine This type of program. Yeah.

Um, uh, we've done some Yeah, yeah. Done some. Yeah.

Yeah. And they've been successful. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we actually ran for five years with Google, uh, uh, Google, uh, uh, we call it the Google Africa Developer Scholarship.

And we trained over a hun like nearly over a hundred thousand African developers in, uh, web application cloud infrastructure. That's fantastic. React.

Um, yeah. So we've, we're build, this is a build on of a legacy of, of us, and that's why CNCF we could showcase, this is something that we have always been doing. You have, right?

You have this DNA And we Yeah, we would like, and we're, we're gonna do it anyway. So we would love to partner with you and grow. One of the best things about this partnership as well is like the, we're growing our Andela learning community.

We have this andela learning community of, you know, as I mentioned, over 150,000, but it's also a part, um, them joining this community. And so, uh, we're really excited about fostering that. It's not just about the certification opportunity, but joining, uh, you know, uh, cube days, meet ops, hackathons, um, the different learning and resources and training that they can get access to beyond our program as well.

Um, networking, um, you know, the community element to it. Um, you know, maybe, you know, in the future, uh, we could be at Q Con Nigeria and having a follow up conversation. You know, Count me in.

I've never been to Nigeria. I'd like to do Kenya too, if you pick that out for me, but just say it anyway, Ross. That's great news.

And you know what? That's, that's good work, man. Yeah.

Yeah. What the world needs. Yeah.

We're really excited. Um, and we're really excited to build on this wonderful, I, you know, the energy here. Yeah.

The people we've been talking to, absolutely wonderful. They're eager to grow it. Um, and we have a huge town pool and l and a lot of learners that want to get connected to it, so we're excited.

So it's a good thing. It's, you know, look, there's a lot of goodness that LF and CNCF are involved in. You know, we tend to look at this floor and all these Yeah.

Companies and, you know, and it's big money. No one's saying it's not. But there's also a lot of good things like this Yeah.

That are just, you know, good. It's, it's, it's a win-win, uh, you know, across for the, uh, talent in Africa. Like, it's completely free.

They get upskill. And then in relation to like andela, like we work with a lot of companies who build roles on our platform and we match them accordingly. 90% of those roles have Kubernetes as a skill point.

So we're meeting that strategic demand. And for CNCF, they want to grow in that market and build and foster that community. So there's no downside for us, other than I have a lot of work to do.

Yes, you do. Yeah. All right.

Get to it, man. Pleasure. Ross O'Neill and ler bringing skills and certifications to Africa and bringing jobs Yeah.

To Africa from around the world and bringing talent. Yeah. That's badly needed to companies around the World.

Hi. The job, the job board there. Have you seen it?

Like, yeah. Hi. We're hiring just everywhere.

Everyone. If you could find someone with skills. Yeah.

All right. We're live. We're wrapping up Cube con day three.

Stay tuned. More coming your way in just a moment.