How do we help a technology giant and their ecosystem partners rapidly fill a massive skill shortage?
In October 2021, Microsoft approached UTS with a challenge. Their industry faced a massive skill shortage for Functional Consultants – a unique role requiring people to have a mix of consulting, technical and business process skills.
Microsoft was looking for solutions to help their channel partners – technology consulting and advisory organisations - access people with the right skills who could fill the role requirements to work in Microsoft Dynamics implementation teams.
Truly understand the skills needs
UTS met with Microsoft and representatives of four channel partners, Avanade, Capgemini, EY and KPMG, to truly understand what specific skills and abilities they wanted in Functional Consultants to design learning that could skill people up in those skills. We further investigated how we might provide pathways for learners into the channel partner ecosystem to fill the estimated thousands of roles they would need over the coming five years.
The solution
Microsoft, the channel partners and academics from UTS’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and our Business School co-designed learning that taught skills specific to the role of a Dynamics Functional Consultant. These skills included stakeholder engagement and storytelling, business processes, and understanding the Dynamics and Power Platform suite of tools and electives, including specialisations for supply chain, accounting, delivering customer value and business analytics.
The course includes a studio where students enact the role of a Functional Consultant for a Dynamics project to give them real-world experience and allow them to hit the ground running in a Functional Consulting career.
Liz Blatchford, Dynamics Business Group Lead, Microsoft ANZ, said, “this is a world first, this incredible collaboration between UTS and Microsoft to build an accelerated program to bring more functional consultants into the market to meet the demand that we’re seeing now and in the future.”
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