J.P Morgan wants its senior technologists to come back again

Technology is a big deal in J.P. Morgan's corporate and investment bank (CIB). The division employs around 10,000 technologists and just hired a new chief technologist in the form of Mike Grimaldi, the ex-Deutsche Bank technologist who spent most of his career at Goldman Sachs.  Now, it wants its former technologists to come back again.

The U.S. bank just opened its "Reentry Program" to technologists in the UK. If you've worked in technology before (either at J.P. Morgan or another bank), were at vice president (VP)-level or above, left voluntarily and have been less than two years out of the market, you have between now and October 27th to apply for a 14 week "re-introduction to corporate life" in J.P. Morgan's technology division in London, Glasgow or Bournemouth. At the end of it, you might be offered a new job.

J.P. Morgan launched its reentry program in New York in 2013 and has run it in the UK for the past three years. However, previous iterations haven't covered technologists. The decision to expand into tech is likely the result of J.P.M's huge technology hiring needs. Assuming a turnover rate of 20% among its technology staff, the CIB alone needs to employ 2,000 new technologists a year just to stand still. In the bank's 2016 annual report released this April, COO Matt Zames said J.P.M gets 10 applicants per role for its tech vacancies; impressive - but nothing compared to the 50 graduate applicants per role for jobs in the investment banking division (IBD).

Even so, not every senior technologist who's left J.P.M for something else is likely to rush back again. Technology teams everywhere are disproportionately male, making it less likely that J.P.M will be able to tap a group of women who've taken extended maternity leave. Instead, those who left may be like Vanessa Menendez-Covelo, the former J.P.M. developer who quit to become an acupuncturist.

"It got to a point for me where I wanted to do something different," Menendez-Covelo told us earlier this year.  "...“For ten years I woke up at 4:30am to go to yoga class at around 5:30am, do yoga until 7am and then be at my desk by 8am, and then work until about 7pm and get home by 8pm."

She added that banking tech had become less exciting than it used to be: "Budgets have been squeezed and you’re asked to do more with less. What I saw in the last few years was that it was all about maintaining systems that were old.”

This being the case, JPM may need to offer more than 14 weeks of corporate reintegration if it wants to lure tech staff back into the fold. The program is open to project managers and business analysts as well as architects, cyber-security specialists, and developers in Java, Python, C++, C#, JavaScript, HTML, WPF, and React (Facebook's library for building composable user interfaces).

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