Team-focused strategy strengthens Leidos UK's technical capabilities

Still, with around 48,000 employees across 400 different locations, Steven realised that ensuring everyone has equal access to opportunities for advancement can't just be left up to local employee networks or the proactiveness of individual line managers.

So, in 2023, he began developing a skills-development platform to enable Leidos UK's technical employees to better understand how they stand in their current role, allowing them to assess their current strengths against defined profiles, identify any skills gaps and training opportunities, and anticipate where their career could take them.

"The aim was to create something that's a bit more individual, both in terms of reflecting the particular needs of our UK customers but also the multitude of different technical roles and the variety of different skills that people may have even within the same role," Steven explains.

The platform enables employees to identify upskilling suggestions which can be met through recommended courses from Leidos UK's TechX academy, which provides both foundational and focused skills training pathways across a range of core engineering disciplines. To date 640 Leidos employees have engaged with TechX academy, 291 of whom have gone on to complete an entire pathway and 37 of whom have now received external accreditations as a result.

Beyond recording and recommending training, Steven also highlighted the need for the Leidos upskilling programme to consider the importance of putting skills into practice through on-the-job experience.

"You can undertake training, but if you don't have the opportunity to implement it practically, then knowledge seeps out of you," he notes. "So, we're making sure that our upskilling programmes are not only ahead of demand but also well timed so that there's opportunity to use a new skill while it's still fresh."