Anatomy of a Software Development Engineer

Background

Scaler is one of Asia’s largest Edu-tech companies, which focuses on providing structured programs by industry experts to young working professionals in the software industry.

India has the highest number of engineers globally and the highest number of engineering education institutes in the world.

Here are some statistics for you

• Every year, India produces approximately 15,00,000 engineering graduates
• 80% of them end up pursuing non-technical careers
• 2,50,000 land relevant jobs in technical domains. Of them, almost 90% are in the all-encompassing ‘software industry.’
• Just 3% end up having high-paying programming jobs.

Scaler plans to solve this tech-talent gap in India through its various programs.


Our Challenge

Scaler has its roots in InterviewBit, which was primarily focused on helping students and young professionals crack interviews in dream companies. Over the past couple of years, there was a shift in the focus towards providing world-class education and creating a new breed of talented expert coders and programmers. This paradigm shift had to be translated into a new brand strategy. We mapped out our challenge in the following points:

1. Develop a deep understanding of India’s relationship with education and career, focusing on engineers working in IT&S fields. 
2. Understand the behavioural biases and drivers at play during the purchasing decision process.
3. Carve out a unique space for the brand and its products in an ever-growing edu-tech category.
4. Craft behavioural strategies and interventions to improve product purchase and usage.

Key Insights

Team 1001 Stories conducted over fifty deep-dive interviews and projectives with stakeholders, industry, experts, recruiters, and influencers. Similarly, we also conducted interviews with IT professionals who had less than 1 year of experience to over 6 years of experience in the IT sector.

This helped us gain a deep understanding of why engineering is often a default educational choice for Indians. Through our projectives, we developed tremendous insight into how professionals identify with work, career, and upskilling. By analyzing the highs and lows of their life path and trajectory, we could decode their hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

Some of our key findings from this exercise were:

1. Engineering is a default educational choice for Indian students
   
2. The meaning and associations of work and career, how a company is a “badge,” pay package, and designation are factors that reflect social markers.
   
3. Since technology keeps innovating and changing every few years, upskilling is an integral part of a software engineer’s life in order to remain relevant in the industry.

By conducting deep dive projectives with participants,

1. We realized how SDEs are positively driven by new challenges, opportunities to try their technical skills, and seeing their effort in action
   
2. We uncovered that there are non-conscious triggers for upskilling, often driven by the need to stay relevant, break out of monotony in their current roles, and more importantly, be at par or a notch above their peer group
   
3. There is a constant dissonance whenever a milestone is reached since there is a misalignment between their long-term goals and the effort put in. We noticed that these efforts were largely geared towards short-term or immediate goals.  

Brand Strategy

With the insight we gathered through our research and multiple discussions with key stakeholders, we realized that the true strength of Scaler lies in building a community. This community must consist of intrinsically motivated and driven Software Engineers who are constantly upskilling and are committed to bridging the gap between their immediate and long-term goals. 

This led us to strategize and create a  new brand strategy and communication codes for Scaler and create behavioural interventions to support the new brand promise through their products and all communication touchpoints.