In today’s podcast, we held a meaningful discussion with serial Entrepreneur Ola Ayeni, the Founder of Claim Academy – an Accelerated Skills Based coding and cyber security boot camp committed to changing people’s lives by getting its graduates meaningful employment in technology development.

Today we discuss content related to growing pains and solving the massive software developer shortage both in the Greater St. Louis area as well as nationally. Ola explains his process in pursuit of developing several businesses – simultaneously – and addressing the great resignation which many business owners have come to experience.

Ola described one of his toughest challenges as not being able hire additional software developers which would allow to scale his business.

According to the St. Louis Business Journal, there are more than 10,000 tech openings in the St. Louis region. His academy has a 93% placement rate in companies and his students on average make $72,000 to start even without a college education.

One of the things that Ola has engaged with to address the growing pains and scalability blocker is to re—evaluate the job description and how he interviews people. Additionally, he is beginning to look at how the required roles for his organization are established.

Key Takeaways:

“I experienced a bigger gratification from Claim Academy’s mission which is to save lives.” – Ola Ayeni

“It’s not just about finding the right people but making sure we have the right people in the right seats and making sure the skills sets are aligned to the business needs.” – Tabetha Sheaver