The Scalers’ 2022 recap: a year of amazing growth
This has been a remarkable year for The Scalers. We’ve further expanded into the Asia-Pacific region by opening a new office in Sydney, Australia and our partnership network and the number of engineers has grown significantly. Overall, we brought nine new Partners on board — more than ever in our history. In terms of engineers for our Partners, this meant an increase from 190 in 2021 to 309 developers in 2022!
2022 was a year of bold decisions and decisive action. Our progress was made possible by the highly talented and engaged teams we built. And several new Chief Happiness Officers (CHOs) have vastly improved our operational excellence to help our Partners scale their businesses even more.
Breaking new ground with our Partners
At The Scalers, we will only ever do one thing — build great tech teams.
But every Partner has different requirements for their team. This year, we embraced some challenges for a couple of our Partners, breaking new ground. Literally.
On the 1st of January 2022, we helped our largest Partner, Preqin launch its own entity in India. This move was only possible due to the rapid growth they’ve experienced over the last couple of years and started a whole new operating model for The Scalers. We’ve continued to run their operations in India, including onboarding, employee engagement, and internal training, so they can focus on delivering their product roadmap.
However, the biggest change has been the creation of Preqin’s own office in the heart of Bangalore, whose opening will be announced at the beginning of 2023.
A final change is our shift from building exclusively development teams to building tech teams. This is more than a change in words as we’ve had to fill data research, finance, marketing, and talent development teams for some of our Partners as they’ve continued to grow.
We’re excited to offer these new offerings to other Partners and can’t wait for the next challenges our Partners present us with.
Getting recognition for excellence
We’ve always strived to maintain a standard of excellence and facilitate sustainable development. We are now proud to announce that we’ve been ISO 9001:2015 certified for improvements in our quality management system!
Getting ISO 9001 accreditation demonstrates our solid commitment to providing high-quality services. Achieving this recognition shows our Partners that we really can meet their needs while maintaining international standards.
Everyone at The Scalers worked tirelessly to audit, review, and evaluate our entire quality management system and documentation to ensure ISO 9001 compliance. Now, by having ISO 9001 certification, we can assure our Partners that our recruitment, HR Administration, Partner Management, and IT security procedures are robust and clearly defined.
Welcoming partners in India
At The Scalers, we work hard to foster a culture of innovation. We firmly believe, however, that this is only achievable through solid cooperation and unity. So, this year we seized the opportunity to bring our Partners’ engineers closer, giving them a chance to spend time with their local teams and learn from one another.
Since September 2022, we’ve had six Partners visit India: Ykone, SigTech, Johnson Health Tech, Preqin, Partylite, and Basis. We gave them a guided tour of Bangalore and held bonding activities with their teams, organised training sessions, and team brainstorming meetings.
Bringing teams closer with workation
Ever since the move to home office started, The Scalers have taken several initiatives to address remote work-related challenges. We aimed to organise workations for each of our Partners to give them a chance to come together as a team. In total, we performed 15 programs, which either took place in the office or a location outside the city. Bringing people together and giving them team-building activities helped them bond. These activities ranged from collaborative cooking sessions to camping and wine-tasting tours.
For our Partner Ykone, for instance, we organised a seven-day engineering workation Tech-Bootcamp in Goa. This gave their leadership team a relaxed and stress-free environment to brainstorm and hammer out ideas with their team members from India while getting to know one another better.
Meeting people face-to-face is much different from meeting them virtually. Our Partners recognised this. We received largely positive responses regarding our strategic thinking and unique approach to restoring the cohesiveness, which had been lost during the pandemic.
The workation program also took giant steps towards showing our Partners that we work tirelessly to meet their needs, whatever they may be.
Taking Partner Success visiting partners
With the opening up of Covid restrictions, our Partner Success team finally had a chance to meet our Partners in Europe.
It was a chance to get to know our Partners and their business in a way that’s just not possible over a Zoom call. Our highlights from these trips included conducting our first face-to-face onboarding sessions with one partner who had recently signed a contract and helping several other Partners plan their next team expansions.
Plus, the hard-working Partner Success team could take in a couple of local sites and cultures during their downtime.
Becoming a Fintech22 official partner
In November, The Scalers became an official Fintech22 event partner. The Australian-based event featured 40+ companies showcasing the latest technologies, investments, services, products, and innovations from the fintech and blockchain industries.
Over a two-day program, exhibitors heard directly from over 60+ Speakers — CEOs, founders, thought-leaders, C-level executives, industry experts, and senior government officials of major blockchain, crypto, and fintech companies.
With over 1500+ visitors in attendance, this event provided us with the opportunity to announce our new office in Sydney and gave us a chance to meet and talk with potential Partners about leveraging a vast talent pool of developers — enabling them to build a fully integrated and dedicated team for all their fintech needs.
The Scalers have been working with various Partners from the fintech industry, so we couldn’t miss being there! Our director of this region, Simon Walsh, had many conversations with business owners and tech decision makers attending the event.
Can’t find the skills you need at home? Stop searching and start scaling
LEARN MORERecognising outstanding employees
This year we launched a Rewards & Recognition program, which was a huge success! This program aims to recognise outstanding employees and motivate others to reach for excellence.
Before a workation with a Partner begins, we send out a form allowing them to nominate one individual and team for a spot award for excellence. Towards the end of the workation program, we hold a Reward & Recognition ceremony with all the engineers present. Each individual and team awarded receives a printed certificate and a significant monetary reward.
Over the past few months, the People & Culture Team has recognised and rewarded 36 Scalers and 17 of our Partners’ engineers, for their dedication and service as they progressed in their careers with The Scalers.
The program focuses on those individuals who embody the company’s mission. Doing so gives the opportunity to celebrate their individual achievements and allows us to acknowledge, as a company, how proud we are of them for striving to build a rewarding culture.
Organising soft skills trainings for engineers
Training and development have two sides; the first deals with improving technical expertise. Throughout the year, we provided engineers with technical training to prepare them for the future. We also offered them the opportunity to obtain specific technical certifications relevant to their roles. We sponsored this training 100% in order to ensure their success and contribution to the scope of work they do.
Nevertheless, at The Scalers, we know there is another side of training and development that we feel is just as critical — soft-skills training. While these skills are not technical, anyone working in the IT industry must have strong soft skills to survive. Knowing this sets us apart from our competitors and increases the quality of engineers we are able to offer our Partners.
Topics that we covered include:
- Mindfulness
- Business Etiquette
- Emotional Resilience through Mindfulness
- Business Etiquette (Business Writing)
- The Johari Window technique
The soft-skills training program for developers was widely praised by our Partners. Overall we had a participation of 104 engineers with training feedback of 4.8/5. Everyone involved has shown tremendous growth, and we are extremely proud of them. As the program is rotational, those who learn interpersonal skills pass what they’ve learned along to the next group of newcomers.
Although engineers are likely to occupy themselves with highly complex technical work, asking them to step outside their typical skill set has encouraged them to grow beyond their own expectations.
Empowering women with Women of Wonders Connect
WoW or (Women of Wonders) Connect is an exclusive forum for women professionals for empowerment, networking, and career development.
At The Scalers, we recognise that women make a profound impact. WoW Connect is all about highlighting gender diversity as a strategic priority. We empower women to be thought leaders who can develop strategies, as well as motivate teams and offices.
Through WoW initiatives, we thrive on enabling our women employees across organisations to succeed. We’re committed to making The Scalers a place where everyone has the potential to make a difference.
Our commitment to this Women’s Initiative (Women of Wonders) serves to help our women employees network and share best practices for their career and personal development. The group is open to all women employees and includes full-time consultants/interns.
The WoW goals are clear. It works to increase opportunities to connect and share knowledge of best practices, confront and address the unique challenges of female employees, and build and strengthen a work-life balance.
WoW Connect achieves its goals through the following initiatives:
- Facilitating the sharing of best practices and strategies that support women’s continued professional success
- Developing a leadership environment
- Promoting wellness through different programs
- Providing opportunities/strategies to help the group strengthen internally and externally
Becoming officially a Great Place to Work
Since The Scalers started, we’ve sought to make the best place to work. This year we received independent validation.
In October 2022, Activated Insights officially recognized The Scalers as a Great Place to Work. This award evaluates employee opinions around workplace atmosphere, equality, mental health and contribution to society. And we achieved outstanding scores in every area.
But we’re not settling there. We’re continuing to invest in our people until we score 100% in every criterion.
Exploring global marketing partnerships
There’s an old African proverb.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
At The Scalers, we know we can do both together. That’s why we started new partnerships with Foundry (formerly IDG Connect), CIO Watercooler and CTO Universe to increase our presence this year in communities of tech decision makers globally.
CTO Universe has been helping us reach out to CTOs and other tech decision makers in the North American region. Meanwhile, Foundry has helped us connect with their global community of CIOs and CTOs in the UK, Ireland, and the United States, so we can share our knowledge and experience in building integrated offshore teams. We’ve organised an outstanding webinar for CIO Watercooler community, where our CEO explained the role of integrated offshore development teams.
Gearing up for 2023
As a whole, 2022 was an amazing year of growth but it wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible efforts of everyone at The Scalers. This is why we are committed to making our company, and our industry, even more people-centric in 2023 — on every level.
By creating a fun and transparent environment that rewards hard work and dedication, we’ve fostered a rewarding and inclusive work culture. This has helped us master our craft and create more long-term value for our Partners.
How we helped a fintech establish a dedicated development centre in Bangalore
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDYThis year, we successfully carried out our mission to improve the offshore industry as a whole. And thanks to the efforts of each and every team we kept to our goal of building a smarter way for businesses to scale.
In 2023, we plan to continue to support our existing Partners in ways that add value to their companies and allow them to scale to new heights.
With a top-notch team in place, we’re positioned even better than before to grow alongside our Partners. We look forward to a year filled with creative initiatives and brand-new partnerships to ensure we stay the industry’s most trusted brand.
