Businesses today face a plethora of challenges, from addressing the skills gap, progressing diversity and inclusion, to meeting sustainability targets.
While many business leaders are motivated to prioritize and work towards these goals, it can be difficult to navigate the right solutions and make the decisions that will lead to long-lasting and effective change.
The channel ecosystem can help businesses find these solutions and implement them faster and more efficiently. Working together, both solutions providers and partners can provide customers with access to the tools, case studies, and expertise needed to help them stay on track and address these key industry issues.
Diversifying talent within the IT channel
Creating and maintaining diverse and inclusive teams remains a top priority for many businesses within the tech industry and beyond. The key to implementing long-term, positive change here lies in training and education.
Establishing DEI programs is a great way for vendors and solutions providers to help businesses learn about the different types of training they can implement to help create a more inclusive workplace. Creating a shared resource of knowledge, as well as shining a light on things like equity engineering and product inclusion, can help businesses better understand their customers’ and employees’ needs.
Simon Aldous is the UKI channel director for Google Cloud. Simon brings a wealth of experience to the role having spent the past 20 years working within the channel ecosystem at vendor, distributor, and reseller.
During this time he has worked for industry leading organizations including Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Microsoft, and more latterly Dropbox where he set up their EMEA channel business from scratch before moving across to run it from a global perspective.
We work with partners to grow and develop DEI initiatives by providing access to sessions that explore how businesses can cultivate inclusive cultures in the workplace as well as thinking about incorporating diversity into business strategies.
By creating opportunities and facilitating these conversations, solutions providers can help businesses better connect with customers as well as attract and retain talent from different backgrounds.
Working together to close the skills gap
While it’s important for businesses to tackle diversity challenges internally with the right training, it’s also necessary to think about how they can help remove access barriers to the industry and help close the skills gap by opening up opportunities for diverse talent.
This is where the channel becomes an invaluable resource. By utilising the channel, solutions providers and partners can identify where the big opportunities are, what skills are in the highest demand, and with this information can work to find ways of making these roles more accessible to those from underrepresented backgrounds.
One way of doing this can be through training and professional employment opportunities aimed at providing individuals from underrepresented groups with the core skills needed for high-in-demand roles.
For example, we did this by working closely with our channel partners to give individuals from different backgrounds the opportunity to learn key cloud skills needed to develop and manage the tools and solutions most valued by customers.
Through this training programme, called Project Katalyst, we successfully provided partners with a reliable source of diverse talent within their organisation to help power growth while bringing in new perspectives and experiences to teams.
Going for green: Incentivizing sustainability
Improving sustainability credentials should be a top priority for businesses, however, in today’s economy it’s becoming harder for business leaders to meet these goals with restricted budgets. Research suggests that 72% of business leaders want to advance their sustainability efforts, but don’t know how.
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For businesses to continue progressing towards their sustainability targets, they need to ensure they have clear decision-making, better ways to measure and track progress, as well as creativity to overcome hurdles.
This is where the channel can really benefit customers, as having access to shared knowledge and resources can guide businesses to the right tools and expertise to help them move closer to achieving their sustainability goals.
Solutions providers have a particularly important role to play here, and can help inspire customers by showcasing the partners who have developed industry-leading solutions to help customers address their ESG challenges.
Creating incentive programmes is a great way to reward and empower partners who are leading the charge when it comes to sustainability, as well as motivate customers to accelerate their own initiatives.
We support partners through our Google Cloud Ready for Sustainability designation, which showcases partners committed to helping customers accelerate their sustainability programmes.
Highlighting these experts helps customers learn more about the tools available which can help them to find and implement the right solution for their particular ESG challenge.
By harnessing the collaborative powers of the channel ecosystem, we can work together to help tackle some of the pressing challenges impacting the industry.
Especially in today’s tough economic climate, working together, sharing best practices and providing access to the right resources and tools to encourage progress has never been more important.
