Within the Cronos Group, Luk Denayer, managing partner at Bluu, is responsible for a cluster of companies focusing on Microsoft technology and, together with Arxus, co-founder of MiCRONOS, the Microsoft community at The Cronos Group. To meet the increased demand for cloud expertise among companies and the shortage of experts, MiCRONOS founded the MiCRONOS Cloud Academy or MiCA for short. Luk tells more about it below.

The so-called "war on talent" is - certainly within IT - not a recent fact, but finding suitable people is becoming increasingly difficult. Since corona, the demand for cloud expertise in particular has risen sharply due to the accelerated digitalization at companies. However, for every 100 employees who retire, only 87 new ones join, creating an ever-widening gap between supply and demand for experts. Recent studies, such as those conducted under Agoria's "Be The Change" program, even state that without appropriate policies, there will be 541,000 unfilled vacancies in the digital spectrum by 2030.

Cronos alone employs 1,200 consultants who are actively engaged in Microsoft technology. If we want to continue our growth, another 1,000 consultants will be needed in the next two years. If you want to find them, then you have to take the initiative as a company and pick people out of the market. Another option is to train them yourself. That is what MiCA is all about: how can we onboard the talent that is out there - and maybe even from another sector - and retrain them in Microsoft cloud technology.

Immediately operational

Today, there are already several initiatives and training courses from other organizations and vendors. There the emphasis is often on studying and obtaining certain skills or certificates. That is a good basis, but MiCA has the ambition to go further. For us it is important that we prepare consultants so that they are immediately operational at customers.

MiCA is the result of the needs that a lot of people had in terms of (re)training their employees. Instead of providing training within each separate company, we merged that into one academy that was available to everyone.

Originally, we mainly wanted to provide our own competence centers with solid training to support our growth with enough experts. But we saw the same problems arise at our customers. Imagine that you have a company with an IT team that has to solve standard IT issues and suddenly has to make a switch to the cloud. Your own team may not have much experience with this. MiCA supports customers at such a time and provides a floor for digital innovation.

Hybrid Academy

The content offered by MiCA, like its creation, is a joint effort from the MiCRONOS community.

On the one hand, we offer participants curated content because if you go online looking for an explanation of a certain topic, you can't see the wood for the trees. Our experts, including some MVPs from Microsoft, help you make the right choices. That may be about Microsoft, but we also very deliberately offer alternatives. On the other hand, we also want to coach participants consciously by giving them support where necessary. MiCA is a hybrid academy where you can follow certain learning moments or tracks online and at your own pace, combined with mentoring from experts. At the moment we have worked out three different tracks: Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365 and the Power platform.

For the company managers who register their employees, we have linked a Learning Management System (LMS) to MiCA. Through the LMS, as a company manager, you get a convenient and transparent overview of where your employees are in which trajectory, and when they can be deployed.

With our Academy, we hope to support the digital acceleration that is currently underway. There are still a number of sectors that are waiting. Once they, too, step into the cloud story, MiCA will be ready to support them in making a successful digital switch.