Addressing the identity security skill shortage

My name is Eelco Veltenaar, and my role is a managing director of AspisID. My name is Bart Kollau, and I'm one of the co-founders of AspisID. AspisID started with the former customer, for Rabobank, that was the first project we did there. And during that project, we saw that there was a lack of skilled resources in the market. And we thought about, OK, how can we help solving that issue and build a company around it? There is a big change going on in the labor market. The recent studies of the United Nations-- it shows that in the coming 10 years, 83 million jobs will disappear. However, 95 million jobs will appear. There is a big need of specific talents. What we do to recruit people is we use a few channels. First of all, we are present at all the universities in Greece, to inform them that what we are, what kind of jobs we offer. So that's one channel. The other one is we ask our colleagues to look for friends, or study colleagues or students, that they know to check if they want to work with us. So sort of a referral program. And the third one is via recruiters in Greece. So we ask them-- we set up profiles, we ask them to go to the market to see if they can attract people to us. We were-- I think we were the first in Europe who tried to invest in junior people. So we recruited people straight from university, from Greece. So that's how we started the company-- with four people. And now we exist for five years, and now we have 50 people in the company, and it's still growing. We create our own methodology to train our people, but also we set up a sort of a pyramid that we have seniors mentoring the mid-years, and mid-years picking up the juniors. Potential before experience-- everyone is looking for experienced people. Nowhere to find. But no one dares to invest in the potential of people. So that's what we try to do with AspisID. But it's also quite interesting field to explore new things almost every day, actually. Yes, actually, it's never boring, working for this company. You always have something new, to face, to understand, to make it work somehow. And also working with nice people make it even more nice. We have very strict principles. The first principle is quite clear-- zero tolerance on quality. The second principle is mentoring until your pensioning. So we ask from people, if you would like to be mentored all your career-- even I have a mentor. So if you don't want to be mentored, you're not allowed into the company. It doesn't sound nice, but it sticks to the quality. And then the third principle is trust us, but focus on authority. So people who look nice and have good talks, it's nice, but you must be able to develop an authority. So that's the third principle. And the fourth principle is potential before experience. So we don't hire for experience, we hire for potential. We analyze, we do tests, we do a lot of things to value the potential of a person. If the potential is good, no experience, no problem. You're welcome in the company. Step by step, good colleagues, and a lot of preparation, I would say. Also what we do is, for example, we have every Friday, we have deep dives. And people can pick up a topic that they want to present to each other. We film it. And for example, if someone wants to know, or wants to share his knowledge about how to build reports, or how to set up some sort of target system connector, or whatever, then we try to give the person a podium for 30 minutes. He presents it, and everyone can learn from it. We record it and people can read it back later on, or can just look at it. So all kinds of things to make sure people connect to each other and start sharing knowledge. The space of Identity security is important for consultants. Of course, because I think for the consultants, there is a lot of interesting work to do, because I think new technologies pop up for themselves to develop in, but also to help customers. The market is so big. So what we now do, we help other partners in other countries-- with people, with resources, with skills-- we even train our competitors. So I had a call from a competitor said, yeah, can you train our people? Why not? Yeah, but you train us to be even more competitive. I don't care, because I expect something back from you in the future. We can collaborate on customers. So at the end of the day, now we work with several partners in Europe. And to be honest, I think that's something people can learn from. I think if you combine loyalty with honesty, fairness, and toughness, then you can really create a strong culture. And last but not least, make a lot of fun.