Meet Tony Lysak, founder of The Software Institute
Tony Lysak has over 25 years’ experience in the software industry, where he has gathered a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies of software development, software consulting, product development, enterprise integration, client side advisory, procurement, licensing and sales.
In 1999 Tony co-founded NETbuilder, a company where he made several acquisitions and sold three business units to publicly listed and private equity backed companies. In 2011 Tony launched the NETbuilder Academy. The Academy grew to become one of the best known and most successful technical academies in the world, eventually being acquired by QA. The NETbuilder Academy became QA Consulting where Tony was Managing Director from 2015 to 2018. Tony founded The Software Institute in 2020 and launched its global enablement programme in 2021.
With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
It’s well documented that the digital skills gap is widening at an exponential rate, with think tanks warning that the UK is heading towards a "catastrophic" digital skills shortage "disaster”. To solve this, many training programmes are now using the academy model, offering recruitment and training on specific themes on a cohort-by-cohort basis, which has worked well enough for many years. However, with the pandemic rapidly accelerating technical innovation, and sparking a trend for up- and re-skilling, this approach is no longer good enough on its own.
The Software Institute’s offering goes one step further than that traditional academy model by providing support to its students throughout their careers. With a focus on quality and velocity of delivery, this means business leaders needn’t choose between specialist training or delivery with continuous professional development. The Global Enablement Programme achieves this by forming specialist partnerships with leading tech and consultancy firms. These partnerships enable businesses to build a long-term and sustainable talent pipeline by identifying the best local talent, in any requested geography and delivering immersive accredited educational courses within the best of breed technologies for software development, digital, cyber and cloud.
Is word of mouth working to your advantage?
Put simply, yes. The Software Institute has a unique proposition that is highly targeted to solve the skills shortages within the world’s largest organisations. Once we get into a room with CIO decision makers to explain this, our proposition is clear. The Global Enablement Programme fills their vital need for talent that is highly specialised in emerging software technologies. The results are multi-disciplined diplomas that fast-track entry to IT roles, benefiting both the talent and employers.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Building a long-term and sustainable talent pipeline. This includes identifying the best local talent, in any requested geography, delivering immersive accredited educational courses, onboarding specialised talent, and ensure continuous professional development. We provide solutions that not only tackle today’s challenges; we also give our clients the opportunity to future proof their business with sustainable options to they can run their own academies. Uniquely, we are willing to assure the quality and velocity of delivery by agreeing to deliverable outcomes as well as traditional academy team augmentation.
What plans do you have for The Software Institute over the next two years?
Having already signed exclusivity and partnership contracts for global transformation, onboarding, and training for hundreds of people spanning North America, South America, Europe and Asia our focus will largely be on signing more of these global deals to partner with fast-growing tech companies and provide transformation services to the Fortune 500. Once signed, we’ll be working on evolving the Global Enablement Programme so that we continuously improve and evolve, making sure we have the right people in the right geographies with the right skills to ensure success attraction, assessment, training, delivery and workforce transformation in any geography and language.
Alongside providing organisations with a sustainable solution to narrow the digital skills gap, The Software Institute’s goal is to provide attractive and competitive job opportunities to employees and students. By prioritising this, we’ll be able to guarantee business leaders access to technical talent not available in the open market. We’ll also be in a great position to deliver meaningful levels of diversity across technology teams, build internal centres of excellence within any technology, and reduce costs for employers by implementing continuous professional development structures.
Does your company help the community that you’re located in?
Our newly renovated UK headquarters, based in Fitzrovia, London, offer five floors dedicated to learning and collaborative working for our students and the local community. We plan to host learning events on our rooftop space and have also built a gaming centre in the basement that is open for all at the institute, including new and casual gamers as well as competitive gamers. In 2022, the TSI Loins will host its first tournament. We have plans to open similar centres in San Francisco and Sydney. In 2022 we will also be offering a free, no obligation place, on every course for talented individuals that didn’t get the opportunity to go to university.
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
Company culture - whether you’re a start-up, rapidly scaling, or a global enterprise - is vital to ensure business success. It’s a fine line to walk and we’ve reached a crucial tipping point with business leaders putting stakes in the ground when it comes to flexible, remote, or hybrid working. The reality is that companies who do not encourage their employees to come back to the office risk cliques forming, with people becoming culturally misaligned with the business’ core values.
It is not a case of right or wrong here, but the simple fact that leaders can’t have half of their workforce headed in a different direction to the company goals. Not only will communication break down across the business thanks to a lack of face-to-face experiences and learning opportunities - such as picking up key skills based simply on sitting next to a colleague and observing how they problem solve, communicate, and resolve conflict - but talent in those disparate groups will begin to look elsewhere to fill that need.
There is a time and a place for solo working and a time for creative collaboration, but with continued innovation widening the chasm that is the skills gap, business leaders can’t risk losing their top talent. They must prioritise finding the right balance for their business. My top tip is to be present, listen to your team, look at outputs, and trust your gut - as a business leader it's one of your most valuable assets, you’ll know if there is or isn’t enough facetime to foster a positive company culture well also achieving growth targets and outputs.
What impact would you like to have on women around the world through your business?
Technology careers, much like pursuing teaching or medicine, take a certain mindset, aptitude, and laser focus on specific skills. The best teams have meaningful levels of diversity - whether that’s the male/female split, race, religion, upbringing, etc. This results in diversity of thought and experience and therefore makes teams more innovative enabling higher performance. Technology teams are no different and with a shortage of the skills currently needed to ensure digital transformation on a global level we have an opportunity to focus on nurturing ambitious talent without bias.
At The Software Institute, we don’t discriminate based on who you are, where you’re from, what you’ve done education or career wise - to be a part of our Global Enablement Programme candidates simply need a base level of skills, a willingness to learn and a growth mindset. Once students have a solid understanding of the skills they need, The Software Institute prides itself in offering additional hands-on experience and mentoring to support students to help them achieve essential recognised industry certifications in their chosen technology.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years?
The beautiful thing about technology is its ability to transform every industry whether that’s through software, hardware or new applications of the technology advancements. During the pandemic we’ve witnessed adoption of tech at the fastest pace we’ve ever seen. With restrictions now lifted, industries won’t drop these newfound capabilities. Instead, I think it is likely that business leaders will double down on tech investments to ensure the sustainable success of their companies.
More specifically for the businesses The Software Institute partners with, we’re seeing great demand for talent trained teams and individuals in the world leading and emerging digital, cyber and cloud technologies. Thanks to the latest tech innovations, those are the specialist skills areas that need to be filled immediately. There is currently huge demand for Adobe, Pega, Splunk, and Tanium as well as the more widely recognised AWS, Google and Microsoft specialist skills. The point here is that technology is constantly evolving. If businesses aren’t planning years into the future, there is a risk that the skills gap will continue to grow and those business will get left behind. Over the next 10 years the priority mustn’t be filling the void - that’ll be a thankless pursuit - instead we need a sustainable approach backed by an agile and flexible workforce that is constantly upskilling.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
It’s never too early to start. This applies to just about every aspect of the journey. The earlier you start the more time you have to practice, get it wrong, and even if you’re right first time it gives more time to continuously improve. In my opinion, the worst thing you can do is over-plan or worse still never start. At NETbuilder – where I was CEO – we tried lots of things that didn’t work but on the outside, it looked like we were going from strength to strength because even when the principal idea didn’t work, we often ended up having additional skills that the market needed or created something that evolved into something else.
One example of this is when we embarked on developing a Content Management system but were too slow at getting to market. In doing so were one of the first companies in the UK to adopt DevOps/CI/SD and partnered with the early market leaders. We never launched the product but ended up selling DevOps consulting services to leading global consultancies and central government including HMRC, Home Office and more. Another was the creation of the Academy in 2011. We struggled to find the right skills and were heavily reliant on lots of singleton contractors so decided to invest in building our own Academy. The Academy outgrew the rest of the business. By 2015 we had several suitors which and to the sale of NETbuilder Academy to become QA Consulting.
None of these would have happened if I had over-planned. I have recently been spearheading the development of a Workforce Management Platform. It automates and provides all the academy services and processes within a product. It is being used right now and will soon be launched in the market. It removes all the labour-intensive processes for running an Academy meaning anyone can build and run their own. The product started out very differently and has iteratively evolved.
What are your top three tips to hire and develop new talent?
Be very clear on what you want, who you want, and the prerequisite skills needed, if any. Attitude and teamwork are key qualities too. Then be clear when you attract and engage. For remote hiring you need very strict processes and objective assessment.
Assess and interview as objectively as possible. We aim to assess and measure in order to make objective decisions in everything we do. Hiring is no different and we look at the data.
Developing talent is all about communication and engagement. This is more challenging with remote working, so you need to make an effort to have at least one formal daily touchpoint then blend this with less frequent informal and wellbeing communications or meetings. Everybody wins and you build stronger more engaged teams and prevent the formation of cliques that may become misaligned with the companies goals, culture and values.
If you could be in a room with 4 entrepreneurs, who would they be and why?
Given my background and profession there are the obvious people who I hugely admire and respect. Many of them have become household names over the past 10-20 years though I’ve followed them for longer. The entrepreneurs that would be fantastic to meet would be:
Ray Kroc – Despite how he was portrayed in a recent movie he created one of the first truly globally scalable systems in a competitive business. Everything from brand, marketing, productions, supply chain, franchising, associate revenue models for sales, products & property and operating models/procedures to back everything up. Plus, starting out a sales guy I bet he’s charismatic too!
John Paul DeJoria – I really have no interest in hairstyles, nor do I like tequila but for someone to go from true poverty to create a globally iconic brand and then do the same a second time in a completely different industry that’s amazing. He also created something scalable with systems which is what I always look at. Also, he looks like he’d have all kinds of fun tales along the way.
Bill Gates – Ambition for global scale decades before the internet and when even travelling overseas to go on holiday was limited. One of the first to create bundled product, software licencing instead of selling a product. I’ve really wanted to avoid the cliché, but he simply did an amazing job for a very long time with vast competition, legal headwinds, and constant innovation.
Richard Branson – Born in 1973 I grew up in the 80s and used to love watching all of Richard’s world record attempts in boats, the balloon attempt, and more. I loved the diversity of his businesses all backed by brand and a customer-first attitude.
