BUSINESS PROFILE
What has your career looked like so far ? skills ; you want to learn Javascript , there ’ s an ample number of online courses for that .
I ’ ve always been interested in tech and was a bedroom coder in the 80s . I was lucky enough to stumble into a programmer role at IBM after graduating with a maths degree . For a few years , I was a hardcore C and C ++ programmer and bear the scars of low-level memory management – javascript kids of today don ’ t realise how lucky they are !
I kind of fell into my next job at Oracle in the 90s . By luck more than judgment , I was planted in the Oracle HRMS Development team , working on its ERP .
What drew me into sticking with HR Technology was the constant change in trends and customer demands . By the time I left Oracle in the mid 00s , I had a modest size dev team of around 25 people across India , UK and US .
I knew how to build software but had not been exposed to actually deploying it . I spent a number of years as a consultant implementing for customers the same software I ’ d spent 10 years developing . Out of that experience , Applaud was born .
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge ?
Each department head has a training budget that is ring-fenced for just that – use it or lose it . Being an IT Company , we find it fairly easy to equip our teams with the required technical
Non-technical skills have taken a little more thought ; we now have management training in place for new managers . Other types of training , e . g ., book-keeping , latest design trends , sales training tend to be ad-hoc .
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard ?
The management culture at Applaud is very collaborative and non-dictatorial . We go light on meetings too ; one 45 minute management meeting per week and one executive committee per month .
Most importantly , our C-suite is made up of individuals who are better in their sphere of work than I am and I trust them implicitly to make the right decisions for our company .
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together ?
One of the most important parts of my day-to-day job is being the one who has the responsibility of knowing what is going on everywhere in the business and pulling people together when some business problems or opportunities require cross-department collaboration . Thankfully , the company culture at Applaud is such that our managers and individual contributors collaborate together without much encouragement . x
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