How did CTO Academy take shape?

They say the best business ideas come from personal experience of something not working well or an unmet need.

CTO Academy emerged from the direct experience of founder Jason Noble struggling through his career as a CTO to find the tech leadership support he wanted and needed.

Always lots of training for the technical, but little available for the more challenging transition into senior roles and acquiring the softer skills required to become an effective tech leader. 

Career progression for a tech leader often starts as an interest in programming, first job as junior programmer and maybe random promotion to senior developer. This can morph into running a small team, progression into more complex projects before aiming for the CTO or equivalent role.

But unlike other C-Suite roles, where you’re learning skills during your career that transition relatively smoothly into senior roles, the road to becoming a tech leader involves a sharp and not always comfortable change of skill set from the technical to the managerial.

Other senior roles have structured professional development. In the UK accountants have ACCA and CIMA, marketeers have CIM and CEOs have MBAs.

But for the CTO it’s been a sparse leadership training landscape, until CTO Academy arrived.

We provide a nuanced, specialist program of leadership courses, coaching and career development that helps global technologists to manage this transition and to become truly effective tech leaders.

Courses

We launched in 2019 with a range of online management skills courses.

They provide an introduction to the nuances of tech leadership and cover 9 management topics – leadership to operations to HR – across a range of micro lectures. We add new material every month, often specifically requested by members.

We’ve already been reviewed as “#2 CTO course and program in the world” – squeezed between the mighty Berkeley CTO Program (priced at a cool $33,000) and Linkedin.

And there is lots more to come in 2021 including the launch of a series of masterclasses. Watch this space.

Coaching

It soon became clear that some subscribers wanted us to ramp up to the next level of support so in early 2020 we launched our online 1:1 coaching service.

We personally match individual members with an expert coach from our global network where they can work together and in confidence to negotiate a particular challenge be it an immediate operational or long term strategic / career issue.

“CTO Academy had a huge impact on my career as a CTO. Not only did the coaching program help us think through tough technical decisions and come up with a hiring strategy for future growth but they also walked us through the evolution of each process in a way that we got a sense of why things are done in a certain way and how everything fits together” – Julie Otieno, CTO, Kenya

Careers

And as the business continued to grow organically we found an increasing demand to provide an end-to-end career development service as members started to ask for support in finding new roles and/or help with their own training and recruitment requirements.

This led to the launch of our careers offering and a wonderful team of experts who provide CV/Linkedin reviews, Interview skills development and more traditional placement services.

Corporate

From these 1:1 relationships we started receiving enquiries from corporates keen to access our nuanced technology leadership services, where all elements of the service (from courses to coaching to career development) can be accessed by team members at different stages of their career.

Our corporate brochure explains more about how we can help up-skill the team, which helps release more time for the CTO focus on their real value add.

The Evolution of CTO Academy … can we help you?

So there you have it, the evolution of a product range in one short article.

Our focus throughout and the vision going forward, is to help individuals acquire the leadership skills required to become truly effective tech leaders and achieve the career they want.

If interested in joining CTO Academy please view our membership packages or get in touch here where one of our team will be happy to help.

We also offer a free introduction to CTO academy call, if you’d like to discuss anything in confidence.

Thanks for reading and hope we can help you at some stage of your career journey.

Jason Noble

Andrew Weaver

CTO Academy Co-Founders