Interview with J.P. Morgan technology MD: "I'm worried about the future of technology graduates in Australia"

We talk to Paul Gladigau, head of technology for worldwide securities services, Australia and New Zealand, J.P. Morgan.

About how large is your security services team for Australia? 

The team is about 100 people across three locations: Sydney, Melbourne and Mumbai. There is a range of roles in each location, divided by job function and work hours, which allows us to align staff to business-unit support and across a 20-hour operating day.

How is the IT department organised at your bank?

We have a utility services team (global technology infrastructure): data services, server, networks and telephony. And then we structure by business unit – eg application development and support. And we have specialist areas such as custodial services. The structure is similar across all APAC teams.

We have domain specialists, but we look for people who have the ability to do the job and the job after that; we don’t just look for technology skill matches. We want people who have the ability to innovate; who can sit within a structured environment, but who also apply innovation to the things they do.

For example in my team, I have people who specialise in production management, development and quality assurance, but they are also aligned to practices where they specialise in transfer agency, custody, fund accounting or pricing. We rotate them between domains to continue to expand their personal, business and technology skills.

Too many firms compartmentalise technology people into sub-specialities and they can’t see the wood for the trees longer term; they can’t offer re-engineering opportunities that affect operational practices. I think that the J.P. Morgan rotation program lets people at the grass roots see these re-engineering possibilities.

What type of technology jobs are you recruiting for, at what level, and why? 

Earlier this year we started an Australian agile transformation, which is about changing our processes and practices to fit within a scrum methodology. We apply this globally, so we have largely been focused on either retraining existing people into those practices or looking for people who have some of those skills, such as scrum masters, agile developers, agile testers, subject matter experts etc.

We have also hired a data architect. Being a very large custodian in multiple markets, data and data delivery are an ongoing theme. We also continue to look at our production management team to ensure we have the right skills.

We have a very low resignation rate, but the team has been retooling, so as people move into new roles, we need to backfill. Whenever possible, we look internally first. There are a lot of skilled people here and we try to give them mobility; whether between roles, countries or business units.

Are there skill shortages in certain IT-banking functions?

Yes and no. There are always shortages in certain domains. If, for example, there is a large amount of regulatory change, technology people who understand that reform can become thin on the ground.

It is a never-ending search to find great talent. We look for team fit; not just for the best java person, for example. We look for people who aren’t afraid to step outside traditional roles and we try to help the team be self-managed.

There is a market-wide problem beginning to manifest itself and J.P. Morgan is working to address it. I'm worried about the future of technology graduates in Australia: are we attracting our best and brightest to do technology degrees? Are we then attracting them into the market and giving them careers so they can grow within an organisation?

Do you only consider candidates with degrees in financial and technology subjects and/or with banking experience?   

No. We have people with a wide variety of degrees; even at executive level we have people with degrees in philosophy or history, for example. We don’t just focus on the traditional financial, economics, commerce and technology areas.

Our graduate program is set up so that a grad who joins our tech function does four rotations of six months across their two-year program and at least one of those is non-technical. Then in reverse, we have people who start non-technical rotations and self-select into the technology team to see what it’s like to implement a strategic change program, for example.

There are also many technology roles where you don’t necessarily need technical experience to be successful; you need the ability to self organise, be analytical, and think on your feet – skills that don’t always come from a technology degree. There are many things we do that are not just finance specific, for example sales management, web delivery and data management. So we’re able to take ideas and candidates from other industries and help them have strong careers because we have such a broad technology delivery. We are also not afraid to look closely at businesses like Google and their technology practices to inject ideas into the way we work.

IT banking has traditionally been male dominated. What policies do you have to attract more women? 

I look at it as trying to attract our unfair share of the disproportionate candidates who are out in the market. J.P. Morgan has been actively targeting these candidates to make sure we are a balanced organisation. Fifty three per cent of our global work-force is female, which is a great place to start from, but we continually focus on trying to attract and retain that talent.

We have our women’s networks, sponsored at the executive level, and we try to influence these groups from a career-management and role-model perspective. For example, in the Australian Women’s Interactive Network, whenever we get a travelling executive, we encourage this person – male or female - to come into the network and talk about their career and how they grew within the organisation to give people ideas and the opportunity to ask questions. We use this to expose people to senior executives.

We have a program called “winning women”, where female leaders address university students on campus. But we try not to be complacent; we have a corporate diversity council that works to identify any unconscious biases that might exist in our practices, so we can erode them as soon as possible. The council is made up of people from across the business, so it’s representative and so that initiatives can be implemented quickly.