Deloitte Uses AWS to Hire and Train Entry-Level Cloud Talent at Scale in Spain

With $59.3 billion in revenue and 415,000 employees worldwide, Deloitte is one of the world’s biggest professional services companies in terms of both revenue and number of employees. With demand for cloud migration at an all-time high in Spain, the company needed to find a way to hire cloud-skilled talent at scale. However, Deloitte found that tenured individuals were a challenge to find and retain, while fresh graduates required lots of training before they could contribute to cloud projects. “When we hire people straight out of college, they have good talent but often lack cloud-specific knowledge,” says Codoñer. “We had to find a way to accelerate cloud training for people joining Deloitte.”

Deloitte and AWS worked together to develop a training program that could scale along with Spain’s cloud market. The goal was for candidates to learn best practices and skills that they could use right away, with training based on real-world scenarios from AWS customers. Successful candidates would earn an AWS Certification, which validates technical skills and cloud expertise.

The effort brought together people from both companies. Deloitte contributed human resources professionals to source candidates and cloud engineers to tutor learners. Meanwhile, experts from various organizations at AWS, including AWS Training and Certification, which equips teams with practical cloud skills, and AWS Worldwide Public Sector, which paves the way for innovation in government, education, nonprofit, and healthcare organizations, teamed up to plan and deliver courses.

As a first step in the 3-week training program, each trainee learned foundational content in AWS Educate, which offers hundreds of hours of self-paced training and resources for new-to-cloud learners. This early stage included free access to hands-on labs in the AWS Management Console, which brings everything needed to access and manage the AWS Cloud together in one place to learn, practice, and evaluate cloud skills in near real time. Next, trainees benefited from in-person instruction from AWS-accredited expert instructors, where they learned more about the foundations of cloud computing and storage as well as how to design good cloud architecture. “We didn’t differentiate between Deloitte and AWS—we acted as one team,” says Codoñer.

Deloitte leaders were excited to see so many people get trained at once. “You get a lot of satisfaction from training new hires,” says Codoñer. “Also, from an engagement point of view, you’re showing candidates that you’re not just hiring them—you’re providing training from AWS, one of the leaders in the cloud market. This is the hottest stuff in tech right now.”

During the program, participants received morning lessons from AWS experts every day. In the afternoon, they were tutored by Deloitte cloud engineers. The training program focused on helping candidates earn their AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification, which validates a foundational understanding of AWS Cloud concepts. By the end of the program, 97 percent of the participants were certified.

As a result of the collaboration, Deloitte made great progress toward closing its cloud-skills gaps to better meet cloud market demand. Fifty-five program graduates are working at Deloitte and contributing to major projects for clients across Spain. For example, program graduates have helped one of the biggest banks in Europe migrate and transform its payment authorization solution on AWS. “It’s amazing,” says Codoñer. “We are happy about the output of the program, both in terms of the number of people we hired and the quality of their work.”

The business impacts of the initiative have been substantial. When Deloitte was hiring candidates one by one, it took 3 months to train each new hire. “This program has cut the time to productivity for new hires by 50 percent,” says Codoñer. And so far, new hires have already stayed with Deloitte 1.5 times longer than the average employee.

The program also helped foster a culture of continuous learning at Deloitte. In fact, many of the new hires have gone on to earn their AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification, which showcases knowledge and skills in AWS technology across a wide range of AWS services.

This won’t be the last collaboration of this kind between Deloitte and AWS in Spain. “We plan to repeat this program on a regular basis,” says Codoñer. Deloitte plans to increase the program capacity to over 100 participants at a time and offer training in smaller cities in addition to Madrid and Barcelona. The company also announced that it is joining the AWS Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance, which unites higher education institutions, government leaders, and Fortune 500 companies to boost career readiness for over 380,000 learners.

Deloitte’s work alongside AWS has also resulted in a greater diversity of viewpoints within the company. Because many of the program participants did not have traditional technology backgrounds, they bring fresh perspectives to new projects.

Deloitte is happy to have built a close working relationship with AWS. “The support and commitment from AWS were outstanding,” says Codoñer. “Without the team’s commitment, this program wouldn’t have been possible.”