Andela

Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business podcast.

Today's guest is Carrol Chang, Chief Executive Officer at Andela.

Andela connects global technologists with Fortune 500 companies to help them build high-performing engineering teams for the AI era.

In today's episode, Carol discusses how AI is changing what technical talent needs to look like and why job titles alone no longer describe what a role actually requires.

She walks through how leaders can redesign hiring and assessment to focus on judgment and problem solving, the skills that matter most once AI handles more of the hands-on technical work, and how mapping a workforce by task instead of title helps teams to stay flexible as rules keep changing.

Today's episode is sponsored by Andela.

If you offer AI products or services into the enterprise, you need to find enterprise leaders with relevance and readiness.

Emerge attracts VP and higher ranking enterprise audiences who are already convinced that they need to move beyond traditional IT.

Other businesses are taking note.

Volkswagen, Motorola Solutions, Andela, and Radisson have planted flags in Rwanda.

The country continues to shift and craft policy to entice foreign direct investment, and a 2023 US State Department report says that it's, quote, "easy to launch a business in Rwanda, but making it profitable can be a challenge." And yet, the GDP continues to climb, growing 8.2% in 2022, hitting $13.31 billion.

In the fall, Kagame announced he would run for re-election again in 2024, which is only possible because his government extended term limits in 2015, and so the fate of the country appears to remain in his hands.

Kenya has Konza Technopolis, the long troubled Silicon Savannah.

Nigeria has the much larger Lagos tech ecosystem, which has produced multiple unicorns including Flutterwave, Andela and Interswitch.

South Africa has Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Even Cairo and Tunis have substantial tech sectors.

... and then place them into companies.

Um, obviously, like, I trust him because he built Andela-

Mm-hmm

... um, a while back.

He s- he built a product from scratch, um, and it was so good.

Like, he had worked at another company called Andela, which is one of Africa's unicorn.

Um, they were big at hiring software engineers, but one of the challenges that they faced were when those American companies were hiring engineers, payroll was a big issue So he stepped out and decided to build, um, the payroll tech side of hiring just employees in Africa.

And he spoke to every HR person he could find, really understand the product, the design, and he built everything.

I already had clients.

Our first customer was Andela.

We saw the country manager at an event.

That was our first B2B customer.

So the third attribute of secularity is people and culture.

This one is very, very key.

And I actually learned this, the importance of having great people and the great culture from Andela and Pesta.

When I was serving Andela as a client, I observed that people were just driven, going in the same direction, and there was something there.

Talk about Flutterwave, uh, Flu- Flutterwave.

Talk about Andela.

It's the same-- They were in the same place.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I would say one of the through lines also from my previous work at Andela training entry-level software developers is is that employers desperately need people with excellent soft skills.

Soft skills are human skills, life skills.

These things are heavily weighted and measured in the work environment.

I would love for us to be able to grow with other nonprofits and get economies of scale instead of competing for funding.

Can you talk about what we jumped into? We kind of jumped into it and kind of some of the details and whatnot here.

But if we take a step back, I can tell your passion for this and we haven't touched too much on, it's pronounced Andela, your company, right? But going even back, what inspired you? Can you talk about your parents, your father? What's giving you like the passion you feel like is something that has always been with you to give you the drive today in your role?

Yeah, absolutely.