BAE Systems AI Upskills Employees to Meet Customer Demand for AWS Expertise

BAE Systems Applied Intelligence (BAE Systems AI), a division of multinational arms, security, and aerospace company BAE Systems, needed to upskill its workforce to meet customer demand for cloud-based solutions. Many of its customers specifically sought Amazon Web Services (AWS) expertise. BAE Systems AI had skilled staff prior to 2020, but the division needed more engineering talent to effectively respond to a surge in demand across the customer base.

Looking to upskill a large number of employees quickly, BAE Systems AI sought aid from AWS Select Consulting Partner QA, a tech skills and talent organization in the United Kingdom. The division wanted to take advantage of QA’s experience in facilitating AWS Training and Certification, which helps participants build and validate their skills so that they can get more out of the cloud. QA, which serves a wide range of private and public sector customers, created customized course offerings to help train BAE Systems AI’s staff, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ongoing AWS Training from QA is enabling BAE Systems AI to upskill and onboard employees, retain customers, and win new business.

QA successfully contextualized BAE Systems AI’s needs into targeted training courses and pathways designed especially for the division. “We held those as private BAE Systems AI events,” says Armitage. “The private training sessions helped people discuss specific questions aligned to what we experience as a division.” As of April 2021, 300 BAE Systems AI employees have been through training, and a number have earned AWS Certifications, with more being awarded on an ongoing basis. “We are planning to train a similar number of employees in 2021,” says Armitage. Moving forward, BAE Systems AI also plans to focus more training on the Developer pathway and additional opportunities in SysOps, business essentials, DevOps, and other topics.

High-quality training opportunities not only create a highly skilled workforce but also increase employee satisfaction and retention by enabling upward job mobility, which in turn facilitates increased retention. The training pathways also make it possible for new hires to get up to speed quickly and efficiently. “Everyone was impressed by the delivery of the courses,” says Armitage. “The feedback from employees has been extremely positive. I can’t praise it enough.”

In addition to boosting employee satisfaction, BAE Systems AI has increased its ability to attract prospective clients that want to see AWS Certification. “Customers in the national security sector are starting to recognize the importance of the cloud and are migrating less-sensitive workloads into that space,” says Armitage. These customers require expert assistance to do so successfully. The number of trained and certified employees at BAE Systems AI increases potential customers’ confidence in BAE Systems AI’s ability to meet their needs. “We’re in a better position to go to market and bid against other companies,” says Armitage. “BAE Systems AI now has around 22 projects running on AWS, which is not a trivial thing.”

With even more training from QA planned for the near future, BAE Systems AI intends to remain competitive in a marketplace that demands cloud-ready solutions. It also expects employee and customer satisfaction to further increase. “The AWS Training from QA enables us to present our market position to customers by demonstrating our teams’ AWS expertise,” says Armitage. “We’re already seeing high customer satisfaction with what we’ve delivered using AWS technology.”