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How young talent helps your organisation thrive

Written by Lien Ponnet on 15 November 2022 for Companies

About six years ago, a global player in the financial services industry reached out to ProjectiveGroup for the roll-out of a Pilot around an innovative service in the correspondent banking landscape. After the successful launch in 2016, this initiative rapidly became the new standard in cross-border payments ensuring that international payments met the industry’s needs for speed, traceability and transparency.

In order to boost & support global adoption, a partnership with ProjectiveGroup was created to handhold & support customers in their E2E onboarding journey. That’s where Philip Somers, Project Manager for ProjectiveGroup, entered play. Philip carefully started putting together a team, consisting of senior experts and young Exellys consultants, to make this programme a success. Today, the team largely consists of Exellys youngsters, who continue to surprise Philip every day.

‘When they first asked me to form this team with young graduates, I was scared,’ Philip admits. ‘For five years, we’d been doing this with people who had more than 10 years of experience in the financial services industry, for clients from all over the world. Honestly, I was worried about these young, inexperienced consultants having to navigate all the sensitivities and difficulties of working with different cultures. But this fear was completely unjustified. These young talents are so motivated, so eager to learn and willing to go the extra mile to prove that they can learn quickly and deliver quality.’

The three pillars of added value

Philip is convinced that young people create a richness in the team. ‘For me, the value of having Exellysts on the team is based on three pillars,’ he explains.

The first pillar is content.

‘Because they’re fresh out of school, young Exellysts are eager to learn. They want to understand and know everything there is to know about the business. Thanks to this motivation, we see a very steep learning curve in our young talents.

And there’s another big advantage to their inexperience: they have an unbiased, fresh perspective. Questions or remarks that you as an experienced project manager hadn’t even thought about, come naturally to them, because they see everything anew. Thanks to our young talents’ input, criticism and improvement points, we were able to finetune our processes to the benefit of our end customers.’

The second pillar is a flat structure.

‘Nobody’s Master Leader of anything – everybody is part of the team and has a dedicated role. It’s important that everybody on the team takes on responsibility and ownership from day 1. By doing so, we are creating growth and new opportunities naturally. All kudos go to the Exellysts, who work their asses off to do a good job. They put the entire group in the spotlight, which in turn brings in new business.’

The third pillar is coaching.

The coaching element that’s embedded in the Exellys model makes a difference even before the consultants’ first day. A lot of effort is made by the Exellys recruitment and talent development teams to look at the person behind the CV, and to match that person with a job offer.

And then there’s the intensive coaching during their time at the client. The added value of the Talent Development Managers (or TDM’s) is one I cannot stress enough. In a structured and at the same time informal way, they support the consultants through professional and personal challenges alike. I have deep respect for the energy the TDM’s put into their coaching endeavours, the preparation that goes into the 360 evaluations and the support they give their consultants every day.’

Conclusion

When you bring these three pillars together, you get natural growth. ‘These young people have the motivation, the freshness and the support to open doors all by themselves, thus broadening the reach of the company as well. We’ve all heard the saying “one plus one equals three.” That’s what we experience in our team as well. That all the different entities within the group are making our success story possible,’ Philip Somers concludes.

Something that we, at Exellys, are really proud of is that this approach not only helps our clients grow but it also enables our people to work on challenging projects. Effectively transcending the traditional ladder structure you often find in a consultancy context. Win-win for everyone.

About Exellys

Exellys is a Tech Talent Incubator. We bring tech talent into the daily operations of the organisation of our customers and grow them for the innovations of tomorrow.

From the 1.500 tech talents we speak to annually, we select the top 7%. We intensively train and coach them on the right skills and competences. Our (scientifically based) training programs (Start Smart, Grow Smart & Lead Smart) accelerate the growth of our talents, and therefore also the growth of our customers.

We “unburden” our clients when looking for and retaining tech talent. We are committed to getting the best out of talent, while our customers can continue to focus on their core business.

We do this for organisations who want to strengthen their team permanently, as well as those who are looking for a flexible, project-driven solution. Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help.