Thread by @senisulyman

Regarding @andela's announcement earlier today (a thread):

1/ Andela started five years ago to solve a simple but pervasive global challenge: Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. I joined Andela in 2016, and this mission still resonates today.

2/ While our mission will never change, our strategy to achieve it has evolved as we’ve grown and learned more about both our market as well as the structural challenges that prevent brilliance and opportunity from connecting.

3/ Our initial strategy was to identify high-potential talent, train them in software development, remote work and soft skills and then place them as full-time distributed engineers. We saw an opportunity to build a business by investing in talent creation in Africa.

4/ Today, Andelans work with more than 200 of the world’s most respected technology companies. As the talent world has evolved, we have as well, and over the past few years it’s become increasingly clear that the world needs we provides: high quality engineering-as-a-service.

5/ It’s also become clear that the majority of the demand is for more experienced talent. This means we have to change the mix/composition of our talent base. We began sourcing and assessing mid-level and senior engineers, and they represent more than 25% of our talent base.

6/ While placing teams led by senior engineers has helped drive additional junior placement, it hasn’t been enough. We now have significantly more junior talent than we are able to place. Those junior engineers want, and deserve, authentic work experience that we can't provide.

7/ As a result, we’ve come to the conclusion that Andela’s next phase of growth requires a strategic shift in how we think about talent. Historically, we have viewed our talent supply as being primarily junior with some mid-level and senior engineers.

8/ Moving forward, we’ll focus on senior talent, with junior talent layered in on top of it. This means letting go of about 250 Andelans in Nigeria and Uganda, and 170 potentially impacted in Kenya. It also means hiring up to 700 experienced engineers by the end of 2020.

9/ The well-being of our employees, both past and present, is our immediate priority. We are providing holistic support programs for those who are affected by this shift, including ongoing access to learning programs and job placement services.

10/ We have also committed a range of financial and emotional resources to former employees, and those who are leaving will continue to have access to the strongest engineering network on the African continent. Once an Andelan, always an Andelan.

11/ We’ve also partnered with innovation hubs in each country (CcHUB, Innovation Village) to identify 60 companies who are looking for developers in their local ecosystem. These hubs will offer impacted engineers the opportunity to use their co-working spaces free for 3 months.

12/ To continue creating junior engineering talent at scale, we will be focusing D0 training efforts on our pan-African hub in Rwanda. We will also continue to invest in the Andela Learning Community, through which we’ve already trained more than 30,000 learners.

13/ We’ve worked really hard to place African engineers on global tech teams and, in the process, we've changed the world’s perception of talent. We've come a long way. Today's announcement was/is hard on all of us and like every other challenge, we'll get through this together.

14/ The Andelans who are leaving our company are amazing and talented people. We call them EPIC. If you get a chance to hire them, you should. We'll share more/clearer details of how you can tap into this talent pool within the next 24-48 hours.