J.P. Morgan technologists Ignite careers with Communities of Practice

By Subba Perepa, Managing Director, Consumer and Community Banking Technology, J.P. Morgan India

India’s path to create a trillion dollar digital economy by 2025 presents a universal need for companies to upskill their workforce. However, at J.P. Morgan, employees throughout India and beyond have been voluntarily future-proofing their technology careers for several years.

When technologists Phil Reid and Per Hammer noticed how digital transformation began to change the job skills required of J.P. Morgan’s technology employees, they sought new ways to encourage lifelong learning and contribute to the bank’s culture of innovation.

To cultivate collaborative learning, Phil and Per landed on establishing an internal network of technical communities to bring people together based on shared interests. While these communities of practice encouraged employees to pursue their passions, they also enabled them to develop new skills and generate knowledge in a social, group environment. By design, these communities ignored traditional corporate silos and brought people together on a professional topic they were interested in or passionate about.

In 2016, Phil, Per, and their colleague Heidi Madsen formally named this “community of communities” Ignite. A short while after the program was founded in Glasgow, Ignite quickly made its way to J.P. Morgan’s technology centers in India to cover essential topics in technology such as cloud computing, machine learning, and UX design. There even emerged Ignite communities for basic coding, allowing employees to join and learn to code, even if they have no coding experience.

Completely voluntary to employees: Ignite has grown to become a space for members to pursue technical interests that may be tangential to their current roles. Now, five years after Ignite’s grass-roots inception, the program consists of over 170 communities that make up a global community of communities. To date, there are 36 active communities across the firm’s tech centers in India, located in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.

While Ignite communities are intentionally informal and take on various structures and formats, their relationship with J.P. Morgan is symbiotic. The communities receive the resources they need in order to be successful, and so much of what the communities do aligns perfectly with J.P. Morgan’s vision for the future of technology.

As illustrated by the following stories from the firm’s Indian tech centers, Ignite has become a platform for innovators to learn new skills, partake in cross-functional problem solving, and even forge new career paths – and friendships – at the company.

AWS DeepRacer Champions

Sairam Naragoni and Yousuf Nizam first learned about AWS DeepRacer in a session put on by the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Community in Hyderabad. Little did they know, this introduction would lead to them becoming global champions in the machine-learning-powered autonomous racing league.

After a year and a half of learning through mentorship and collaboration in their Ignite community, Sairam and Yousuf placed first and second, respectively, in Amazon Web Services (AWS) DeepRacer global finals. (Across the globe, Tyler Wooten, who is based in Houston and also active in Ignite communities, additionally placed seventh in the finals representing J.P. Morgan.)

As winners of a large field consisting of more than 80K developers worldwide, Sairam and Yousuf are now regularly sharing their learnings back with their Ignite community and encouraging others to join the communities of practice. Yousuf shares, “The opportunities to learn through Ignite are endless.”

Harnessing the Power of Design Thinking

Dipen Visavadia, a software engineer at J.P. Morgan, leveraged the network he gained through the Mumbai-based Design Thinking Community of Practice to grow personally and professionally. In order to practice his facilitation skills and share his knowledge of design thinking, Dipen launched an Ignite community and put social learning to action by facilitating hands-on activities on user centers. Now, he consults at the India leadership team level, helping technologists apply design thinking to their user research.

Creative Cloud Skills Adoption

Hyderabad’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Community of Practice runs hackathon challenges using Amazon’s DeepRacer to help employees learn AWS Public Cloud in exciting, new ways. The Cloud Community of Practice in Hyderabad has also been busy facilitating voluntary cloud migration clinics and workshops, providing hands-on sessions and helping individuals navigate Cloud certifications.

Automation Through Mentorship

J.P. Morgan technologists in Bengaluru have been bridging the gap between traditional business functions and technology using social learning to teach coding and automate business tasks. The tech center’s Automation Community of Practice conducted a two-part series covering JAVA Basics series with a huge response from participants, where participants were paired with mentors.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by ET Edge