Pan-African tech firm, Andela, on Tuesday, announced that it is laying off up to 420 junior engineering jobs across its operations in Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.
Approximately 250 junior engineers and staff from its Nigeria and Uganda hubs were affected with another 170 potentially impacted in Kenya, the company said in a press release. The move comes as the company looks to restructure its talent pool to more closely align with global market demand, it added.
“As the talent world has evolved, we have as well, and over the past few years it’s become increasingly clear that the world needs what Andela provides: high-quality engineering-as-a-service,” Andela co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Johnson said.
The CEO explained that the majority of the demand is for more experienced talent, and to keep up with it, the firm needs to grow its senior talent base even faster.
“This shift in demand also means that we now have more junior talent than we are able to place. This is a challenge for the business, and for these junior engineers who want, and deserve, authentic work experiences that we are not able to provide,” Johnson added.
As for all impacted and potentially impacted employees, Andela is now working with them and is “committed to providing a holistic professional and financial support package.”
Additionally, the company is partnering with Co-Creation HUB (CcHub) in Nigeria, iHub in Kenya, and Innovation Village in Uganda to help connect impacted developers with opportunities in their local ecosystems.
Together, they have identified over 60 companies who are looking to hire top quality junior engineering talent. These hubs will also offer impacted engineers the opportunity to use their co-working spaces free of charge for the next three months, Andela said.
“Our immediate focus is on providing practical support to those employees who are impacted by the restructure,” Andela’s Nigeria Country Director, Omowale David-Ashiru, says. “And we will provide them with the resources they need to succeed in their next steps”.
Beyond this restructuring, Andela continues to grow rapidly with plans to hire an additional 700 experienced engineers by the end of 2020. Today’s announcement will not affect Andela customers’ operations, as the company evolves to deliver even stronger engineering support for their teams, the company said.
Moving forward, the company will continue to invest in the Andela Learning Community (ALC), which has already introduced over 30,000 learners from across the continent to software engineering. Over the next three years, the company says it expects over 100,000 engineers from across the continent to take advantage of programs within the community.
“Five years ago, we launched Andela to solve a global challenge … To succeed in our long-term mission, we have to make tough decisions to continue growing a company that we know will change the way the world thinks about talent,” Johnson added.
Andela is a global technology company that builds distributed engineering teams with Africa’s top software engineers. In five years, Andela has hired more than 1,500 software engineers, with its largest engineering centres in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, and Kigali, a growing presence in Cairo and Accra, and offices in NYC, SF, and Austin.
