#102, Transforming Tesco through Technology: Aji Bawo, Head of Product and Naamua Dodoo, Graduate Software Engineer

24:56that's been probably my biggest notice in terms of a shift from a graduate right okay so it's more of a meritocracy now as opposed to a very specific type of person very specific it would have been the Cambridge it would have been the Oxfords it would have been those are universities that Tesco would target to go to yeah sure whereby now I'm seeing such a diversity in terms of I'm going to be very specific to look for female talent I'm going to be very specific to look for people from an ethnic minority community because we know they'll bring something different that wasn't there from a strategy perspective in terms of recruiting graduates and I've seen a massive shift in that recently.

25:32So is that shift something that is a result of some proactive activity? Did you legislate to get it like that or did it just naturally shift as the world as the UK became more diverse? Was it a gradual natural change or did Tesco take action? I think it's been very intentional. I don't think it was naturally the same. I think as leaders shifted in Tesco as events have occurred. I actually think the George Floyd incident had a massive impact in Tesco's shift. Huge. Because we started to create plans that were specific around Black people. We started to create plans that were specific for maybe women.

26:11And Tesco became a lot more intentional about its hiring, which I've never seen before. So it was an intentional strategy shift to say, we know as a business that hiring diverse candidates will grow our business. It will give us profits. And actually, from a culture perspective, it will move the dial. And then Tesco became a lot more intentional about the type of people that they were hiring. Yeah. No, fantastic. That's really, really, yeah. I mean, that's fantastic, though. I mean, so in terms of the organization right now, obviously, the leadership level is a lot more diverse. The teams are a lot more diverse.

26:46Could you maybe talk us through why that's benefited Tesco? What's the benefit of that? and what is, you know, because it's a very positive change from the inside looking out. But what benefits has that brought to Tesco, do you think? Oh, massive. I think the way we brought up and the way we think is very different. And even individuals within the same household don't always have the same thoughts, right? Yeah, sure. Everyone's got a very different journey. Everyone's got something to bring. And I think what I've found, especially advice, I've got a very diverse team. And what I've found is that no individual person always has the same thought or the same idea.

27:21And every time someone comes up with something, there's always someone with a different angle or a different view. And from a Tesco perspective, this has brought revenue. This has brought a culture shift. This has brought innovation, massive innovation around our thinking in terms of products that we sell, install, technology that we build everywhere. Sure. So I think overall, it's just made a massive difference in terms of not only people, but also even commercially as a business. We are a for-profit organization and it's fundamentally shifted how we, you know, we're arranging products now that are targeting a certain community.

27:55We're selling stuff that we wouldn't have sold before. I always use the example of Indomie noodles. I always talk to our commercial directors about you really want to get black people going into your shops. You want to sell Indomie, but you don't want to just sell any kind of noodles because they won't buy it. Yeah, sure. If you don't have buyers that know that, how are you going to target your audience when a lot of the population in London, for example, is from ethnic minority groups? Yeah, absolutely. Now, that's fascinating. I can totally see why Tesco would massively benefit from having their leadership team and their products being created by people who better represent their customers.

28:31Do you see what I mean? As Tesco is selling to people of all backgrounds, of course they are. And I think that is now, you know, I think having your leadership team consisting of a more diverse group of people is surely going to improve the quality of the products and the quality of the service that you deliver to your customers. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. We always talk about, if you came to Welling, and I'm sure this was a shock for you number one when you first came. If you rock up to Wellingad Institute, which is our head office, not diverse at all. Massively shocking. But if you rocked up to a Tesco store, the people that we serve are not, we're not representing the people within the head office.

29:14And for me, it's that kind of diversity that you need to bring into the decision-making point to allow us to make better decisions for the people that we serve outside. Can you give us your take on that, Namwa? Are you seeing, do you feel now that the organization that you've joined are, obviously a very diverse leadership team, more women, more people from underrepresented backgrounds. Does that make you as a graduate who's just joined the organization feel a little bit that sky's the limit, that meritocracy is there? If you work hard and you hit your targets and your goals, that you will achieve whatever you want to achieve in this organization.

29:52Do you feel like that? Yeah, no, it is definitely reassuring. In fact, I remember back when I was in my first team. So this was going back to around like December 2022. And I was talking to one of the product management graduates and he told me about a special someone, Adji. Oh, wow. And I heard about how she'd gone from software engineering to product management and he was literally just singing her praises. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is so cool that someone like me, even though you did move to product management, it's so cool. but yeah I think it's reassuring because yeah in school when I was studying computer science it's not common that girls will study computer science so you do feel a bit different trying to go down that path and my computer science teacher even kind of like warned me before going to university that I will be probably the odd one out and I did end up being one of the few different people in the course like going into the tech industry I was a little bit nervous because I I thought, well, I don't know how I'm going to be treated because it's not about me just being different, coming from a different background, but it's very visible that I don't look like other engineers that I'm working with.

31:07But it doesn't hold me back. It doesn't stop me. And of course, all companies still have a way to go to be more and more diverse. And everyone's making that progress. But I'm relieved that I don't feel like I'm stuck at this level just because I am a black girl in tech. Yeah, I think it is, the numbers are still very poor, aren't they, in terms of women in technology. And I don't know the numbers in terms of like people from underrepresented groups and diverse backgrounds, but certainly the gender split in the technology sector is still, I read the other day, it's 26 % in the UK. Now, I don't know how robust those numbers are.

31:45I think it was a HR magazine who came up with that, but it's still not great. It should be 50-50. There's no justifiable logical reason why there are not more women in the sector, apart from I interviewed the EMEA general manager of Google Cloud Security. She was talking about how when she was young, growing up in Spain, she was expected to go into a traditional female-based vocation. And I don't think the people who are pushing those stereotypes have sinister intentions. It's just a cultural thing. I mean, and that's what we need to change. I don't think anyone's out there going, right, women can't work in these careers.

32:26No one's doing that. I think it's just the way we act. We have to broaden our minds. You know, I've got two daughters. I'd love them to work in the technology sector. I would love them to be, you know, looked up to like Adji is, as an inspirational person who's blazing a trail, you know. But yeah, you know, I don't know if these perceptions are going to change. Do you think we're making progress, Adji? it seems like you are in Tesco, but generally, are we making progress as a society? Society? Yeah, I think it's two things. And I'm always really honest about the fact that it's not just the companies as well, it's also our community.

33:02And please tell me if I'm being wrong, I know if I went to someone from my background, my community, and I said to them, would your son or daughter want to come and work at Tesco? The first thing they'll say to me is, oh, I don't want them to work in a store because in their minds, Tesco's a store. If I went to them and said, oh, I want your daughter to work at Facebook or Google, they'll be jumping up and down the chairs because they'll be super excited. In their minds, those are tech companies. So as soon as I say two things, I think we need to, as a community, we need to get better at understanding that retail companies are as high tech as you would have your goals or your methods, for example, right?

33:39That's for us to do. And I think number one, there was an incredible job. She runs this work experience program amazing where schools coming into tesco um year 10s year 11s and year 12s to actually see for a whole week what it's like to work yeah in the industry and actually for people coming from our background when they come in and see that it gives them something to aim for it gives them a vision of a dream of something that they could be and normally all they think about tesco is i need to work and get a packet quiz and a prime drink or whatever that's it they see it as a store so But those initiatives that NAMU1 does would really help people to understand a little bit more about what we offer.

34:18That's one part. The second part is companies need to do better at reaching out to universities in those communities. Not all people from a Black background would go to Cambridge or Oxford. Minimal. But you've got a lot of really smart kids, very resilient, really hardworking, that go to universities that Tesco may not deem the top-notch universities. I started at Middlesex University only because I came here as an immigrant. that's what I could afford. I had to pay for my own uni fees, right? It didn't make me any less smarter than anybody who went to Oxford or Cambridge. I just didn't have the right opportunities there.

34:52So how can we go to those universities? How can we go to those schools, similar to what Nama was bringing, and pull those kids in very early, do internships, work experience in, to show them what we offer? Yeah. Then that, for me, those two combined would be a nice balance. Yeah. Just to add to that, actually, I do have two examples based on the work experience placements that we've been running. So for context, I'm leading a sort of committee of technology colleagues that run week-long work experience placements for students between the ages of 14 to 18 years old. So we bring them into Tesco Technology for the week and we try and expose them to a variety of job roles because a lot of the time the assumption is if I'm working in tech, I have to be a software engineer.

35:33And that can be quite off-putting. But also, as Adji was saying, if you hear Tesco, you don't think Tesco technology, you don't assume that's a thing. You think of maybe like TILs, but you don't consider all the other things that we could possibly be doing. So one of the students, I asked her at the end of the week, I said, what did you think of your placement? What were your expectations versus like the reality and what you know? And she said in school when like her teacher explained to her class that she was going to be doing her work experience at Tesco, apparently they all laughed at her because they assumed that she was just going to be sitting in a call center.

36:09Meanwhile, she spent the whole week learning so much about all the different operations and the tech teams that come together to build this big, big operation. where we feed the nation. So I think a lot of the time when you're thinking of companies that aren't traditionally considered the tech companies, you're not going to go down that route because you think, oh, well, why would I even apply? Because surely they're not offering opportunities for me. And the second example is, again, a similar thing with a different work experience student. I was kind of asking to understand if he'd be interested in coming back to Tesco Technology.

36:46And again, it was the same thing of, He didn't realize that Tesco had this big department of so, so many colleagues. And coming into it, he thought, well, I'll probably learn a bit about tech, but I'm probably just going to end up going to one of the fang companies. And fang being Facebook, Amazon, I never remember all the letters, Netflix, Google. I think there's another one in there, Apple. So I think a lot of students, even if they are really interested in tech, they'll immediately go down that route and think, okay, I have to go for the big, big companies. and not consider that technology is everywhere today.

37:18Of course, every company is a tech company now, isn't it? Yeah, there's so many ways to work in tech in different departments or different industries. So we're in retail, but we're still working in tech. Yeah, brilliant. I want to talk about the gap between the education, academia, education, academia, and industry, okay? Number one is clearly probably someone who's not done too bad in terms of bridging that gap and is a high performer. but what about graduates generally, Aji? Are you seeing people leaving academia, joining Tesco and they're ready to go? Are they getting prepared or is this a real uphill struggle to get them into the right mentality and the way of working and the drive and the determination that you need to succeed in the corporate or the business world?

38:04What are you seeing with that? I've seen some graduates who come in, genuinely, because I've had a lot of graduates pass through my team and I've seen some come in and just literally get it. And they come in and they just get on. Like Namor was a superstar. And I've seen some graduates who genuinely join and they really struggle because what you learn in uni is very theoretical. And I think it's something that needs to change. They genuinely don't tell you about everything else that's included. You're coming into a workplace where you have to work with people. You're working with people from different backgrounds, different thinking, you know, there's nothing that teaches you that at uni.

38:39Yeah. And this is why I think people that do work experience or internships maybe have a little bit of an edge because they've got at least seen a little bit of a snippet of what it's like. But where I see them struggle isn't technically that they're not smart. They are very smart. But where I see them struggle is their softer skills around leadership, how you collaborate with people, how you influence, right? And how you do all of that still being your authentic self. yeah no i completely agree massively struggle yeah they feel a lot of them feel like they've got to play a role and put on a facade and be someone else yeah and they copy they copy they see number one doing this or maybe i'll do that as well or they see as you're doing that and oh i'll try that as well when actually i always say to people if it's if it's not your a game and you want to try if if number one's fantastic at collaborating and you're you're it's that's not you but then you want to compete number one doing that you're 100 % gonna fall flat yeah what you need to do is identify what your strengths are and then how do you leverage those strengths to heighten it so that you're fantastic at what you're good at and number one can be fantastic at what she's good at yeah and you can both win that I see them struggling a little bit when they first come in I think that's a confidence thing isn't it a lot of the time you you feel like you're not good enough so you need to try and be like somebody else or you need to act in a certain way to fit in with the people around you and this kind of lends in to the importance of role models doesn't it but i think ultimately you just want you just need to be namwa you just need to be yourself because that brings something to the table but you need to be confident enough to read to believe that i think that's the key thing isn't it and that's a cultural thing you just need to have that culture i suppose but um and it's also a girl it's also a female thing as well gareth weirdly enough it's a very female thing i always say that we we raise our boys to be very brave and we raise our girls to try and be perfect and you can't be perfect in you can't be perfect in a corporate world so if girls see a jobs description they want to tick every single box on that it has to be 100 right before they apply yeah so i think even as parents we need to do better at raising our girls to be a bit braver to take risk and to be a bit because that's what builds the confidence really yeah and to know that they can learn they're gonna fail they're gonna you know fall get up and all of that i think there's an element of gender in it as well i think it is a bit of a british thing as well in that we do tend and it is the education system i think in britain i'm not sure about the rest of europe but i like i'm thinking about it in comparison to america where it's like a badge of honor if you failed at something because it's like this mentality that you know you're gonna fail forward you know if you if you set up a business and is gone, you know, and you're a failed entrepreneur, you know, you're on your sixth business.

41:25It's like, you know, you brag about it. In Britain, it's like, we can't fail once because it's a disaster because my, you know, family will find out. And it's just this fear of failure, I think. Yeah, it's worse in Africa, Gareth. They would grade you. So at the end of the term, it's who's come first, second, third, all the way to 45th in the class. Yeah. And from an African perspective, you coming last, it's like they will bury you. They would like, it's not a thing. So there's no concept of people can fail and they can, you know, like Americans to your point, there's no concept of that at all.

41:59So everything has to be perfect. So can I move on to AI? Because I really want to talk about technology innovation, guys, because it's obviously probably one of the most profound or maybe one of the most exciting shifts in technology and technology capability for businesses in quite a long time, the last two years. We've all been quite blown away by ChatGBT, for example, but it hasn't really infiltrated and affected businesses too much yet. How has Tesco benefited from AI, large language models and automation over the last two years? Is it something you've embraced? Is it something you're not really there yet?

42:36Where are you at in your AI journey? So I have a team specifically just dedicated at AI and ML and looking at intelligence. How can we use intelligence to allow us to make better decisions? So may not be fancy examples that I'll give, but simple examples. For example, in retail, I don't know if you've noticed, Gareth, or maybe you know more how. Ever so often, the low pack water is shrinking, as an example. Every time you go to the shop, it's gone down from 500 mil to 350 mil. So we're using different AI models, LLM being most recent, we're using to look at how can we identify when a product's changed and how can we make sure from a customer price point we're not charging them anymore for that product because it's gone down in size.

43:18And how do we flag that up to our commercial teams making the decisions with the suppliers to say, why are you reducing the price of low-pack, even though the cost price you're charging before is still the same. Another example is the Quietly Street chocolate. Years ago, the Quietly Street top was this big. now it's that big but that's where we're using eHU Identify and actually suppliers have been a little bit cheeky and reducing the sizes of stuff we're also looking at things like automatic content generation so obviously Tesco uses a lot of content on description sizes and stuff like that how do we remove the need of and this is not saying that humans wouldn't be needed for it but how do we reduce the load on them by automatically generating content using LLM models and getting them to come in and just validate that whatever the machines come up with looks right.

44:05And there's a lot of innovation happening in our labs team. I know they're doing a whole lot more using a lot of AI, but it's just some examples that we use in MySpace that we're looking at around how can we help customers shop better online by, you know, identifying, making sure they've got the right descriptions, ensuring our search engines are optimized with better attributes using AI models, things like that. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Can I ask you, Namwa, in terms of AI generally, and it doesn't have to be within Tesco, but just AI generally, what are you most excited about as a software engineer?

44:37I think AI is definitely growing and it's being incorporated in so many different aspects of life now, which I think is really cool because, yeah, it will make our lives so much more easier. Putting, like, pulling in, like, a Tesco example, I don't know if you're familiar with our Tesco get-go stores. Is that the one you don't have any people working there? You just walk out and it charges you because it recognizes you or something. Yeah, so that was developed by our innovation team, our Tesco Labs team. How many stores have you got doing that now? Yeah, they've got in a few stores in London and they've got it in our main office as well in Wellingaddon City.

45:12I think we launched one in Birmingham as well. I'm not too sure. It must be so weird. Just going out, picking something up and walking out. It's just like, but it's quite fun. It's so, so fast. It's really fast. I knew Amazon were doing it, but I didn't know. I heard Tesco were doing it, but I've never seen a store. Yeah, yeah, no. So it's really easy to go and grab food. Yeah, as you said, we have one on campus. So walking in, scanning the QR code, and then just picking up everything and walking up. And it's so quick, so fast. And I love it. I love it so much. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. Is it facial recognition or is it some sort of scanning thing you walk?

45:48I don't know how it works. It's tied to your club card. And we've got some barriers. So your club card will generate like a QR code on your phone. you can scan in through to get through the barriers. And we've got loads and loads of cameras dotted about in the ceiling. So it's using computer vision to be able to track each individual and the shelves themselves are weighted so that when you pick up something, it's the combination of we know who's picked it up and we know what you've picked up based on the weight. And we've also got, yeah, so that's for just walking in and out. But we also have this hybrid version.

46:22So you can still pay it at the till. so when you walk up to the till it says something like let's see what's in your basket and then it just pops up on the till so you don't need to scan absolutely that's incredible it's so accurate i tried it with two croissants i thought it wouldn't know i've got two croissants in the back yeah but it does know you've got two croissants it's shockingly accurate it's yeah you know shop lifting probably a big problem at the moment in most places um how do you stop it in a place like that then you know what i mean because i'm sure you can see it and everyone's everything is on camera but if someone just walks in doesn't care and take stuff and leaves are there any staff there to get to get alerted by that and to like stop them or how do you deal with that so we have one in Hoban in central London they've done a slightly different approach to what we have on campus where everyone walks through the barriers and you have to scan either a physical receipt or your club card to get out so there's no way of leaving without like showing signs of purchase yeah okay that completely solves the problem then yeah in our technology they've got a team called the store platform team and they have a platform called computer vision to number one point massive ai innovation and they do a lot of work on theft and making sure especially on the self-scan tools that what you're putting in weight wise scans and they've got cameras everywhere literally so they've got some really interesting videos where they'll show you how the camera can pick up people trying to trying to steal stuff across the stores.

47:49But there's a lot of technical work and AI that goes into that as well. No, I can imagine. Now, that's incredible. I mean, that's clearly the future, isn't it? But that is a really good segue into jobs displacement, okay? And probably not going to affect you guys, but I think task displacement will. I think tasks will be automated, that you will be intrinsic parts of your jobs, I'm sure, at some point. But the reason this is, the sort of spin I want to put on this question is in terms of graduate recruitment and entry level recruitment, you often give, you know, junior members of staff who join the organization more, you know, lower level tasks to get on with in order to learn the ropes.

48:28Yeah. You know, to sort of learn how the business works and stuff like that. So the question is, do you think automation and AI is going to have a detrimental effect? It's going to decrease the amount of graduates that you are potentially going to hire? Or do you think it's going to increase? Or do you think it's going to evolve the type of skills that you look for in graduates at all? It's going to change the type of hiring that we do in terms of the skill sets that we look for. But I don't think necessarily at the moment anyway, it's going to reduce the number of people. So I know a lot of people are worried about the jobs.

48:57I don't think it's about that you lose your job. I think it will evolve the type of people that we need, which is why I always encourage my teams around learning to think about, look ahead and think, what skill set do I need to have to allow me to stay in role. So AI problem managers, for example, people learning Python as an example, is going to grow because someone needs to build these AI models. It doesn't build itself. So as individuals, what we need to think about is how do we upskill ourselves and how do we learn to get ready for the future? But I don't necessarily think it's going to be a displacement.

49:31It'll only be a displacement of jobs if you're not willing to grow and if you're not willing to adapt. That's where my head's at with it. Yeah, I think you're spot on. I think the people who are able to utilize these new tools, I've got such an advantage over everyone else now, in most lines of work. Do you know what I mean? Like I use ChatGPT all the time. I never get it to do work for me and then just use that content. I use it as a research tool to format things. Do you know what I mean? And it's like when there's integrations, just as a research tool or whatever, to contextualize things, to come up with new ideas.

50:09But I wanted to move it on to you, Namwa, because there was an interesting video that went out, and it was quite well shared on social media and things from the founder or maybe the CEO of NVIDIA, one of the sort of chip companies behind AI. But he was saying that software engineering is going to be massively disrupted by AI because everyone is going to have software engineering capability through simple prompts and stuff like that, you know? I don't think it'll kill software engineering ever because who the hell is going to build the models? But you know what I mean? It clearly is going to have an enormous impact on software engineering as a vocation.

50:49What do you think? Yeah, so I'm aware that you can just copy and paste a snippet of code and be like, what does this do? And it will tell you. And the alternative is also you can give a prompt and it will write some code for you. so it definitely has the capabilities of being able to kind of maybe not build the whole application but it can definitely aid software developers and if this keeps like improving maybe it's got the capabilities to take it a lot further and maybe not take our jobs completely but I think all in all yeah that there is that risk but I think when it comes to for example grad recruitment it just means we have to be a little bit more like on our toes it's important to make sure that you double check or like maybe doing like live coding assessments because you want to make sure that you know that your candidates actually do know what they're doing.

51:42Because at the end of the day, we do want to make sure that our code is of good quality and it's definitely doing what we want it to do. And it's not just being written by a third party source that we haven't verified or cross checked. But also, other than that, when you think about things that are a bit more like front end related, so front end being like websites and things, there's a whole lot of things that I don't know if AI can do. for example, talking about accessibility. So we do still need those different minds to be able to be like, hey, we can't actually navigate through this page by pressing like tab or like the ARRI keys or using voice control.

52:16I don't know if AI is capable of doing that. I mean, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's something that you can do for that. Yeah, it's learning. But I think to your point, you're right, Dan. It does need people in. Because if I think about the automated voice that uses AI, imagine the amount of accents that we've got across the UK. I know I struggle when it says, did you say that? And I did not even go close to it, right? So we need people to be able to code it in a way that it knows that it's not linear, that everything's going to be different. You've got people from Croydon, people from Wales, people from...

52:50So how can we adapt to those accents? That is not something that AI can do automatically. Your role will probably change, Namwa, through your career. if you decide to stay hands-on as an engineer. But I don't think the output will change that much. And what I mean is that you may not need to write code anymore, but you'll still be creating applications. You'll just be doing it in a different way. You know what I mean? And anyone can, I think someone, I stole this off someone else, but anyone can put a bit of cement on a brick and lay a brick, but not everyone can build a house. Do you see what I mean?

53:23Because there's other considerations around building a house. You know what I mean? So you may not be doing the granular elements of software engineering in a couple of years, but you'll be working on bigger problems than that, like more exciting problems. You know, what do people actually want, you know? So it'll probably just be a little bit more user experience chucked in and SEO or whatever, you know, other things, you know what I mean? So I think it'll be exciting for software engineers. You'll just have more comprehensive remits, I suppose. So I just want to finish on these then. I've got a couple of things.

53:54So Namwork, if we could start with you. If you were giving some advice now to a graduate who's leaving university this year, in terms of your journey, what advice would you give to graduates right now? I would say don't limit your options. And also, you don't need to know everything. I think coming into the tech industry, I was like, oh, no, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do that. A lot of it is learning on the job and learning together. so I think having that sort of mindset is the growth mindset but like understanding that it's okay if you have gaps in your knowledge because you'll just figure out together as a team yeah fantastic absolutely embrace and don't be scared to make mistakes because that's analysis paralysis they call it don't they I mean if you overanalyze things then you'll probably succumb to them you know but um actually can I ask you a very a bit more of a pointed question I want you to look back at the beginning of your career.

54:48Okay. And the question is, what advice would you give to your pre-Tesco self? Main advice for me is be really clear on what you like and more importantly, what you don't like, and then choose a career that you don't. So it's not hard work. I love my job. It doesn't feel like a job, right? So be really clear on what you like, but also more importantly, be brave. I just want to really, if I was talking to 18 year old girls, I'll be saying to them, be brave. You don't have to be perfect. None of us are. We're all work in progress. Be brave, take risks, and you definitely reap the rewards if you do.

55:26That would be my advice. Fantastic. Is there a piece of content that you guys have been inspired by recently that you could recommend to the listeners? Yeah. So How Women Rise is a wonderful recommendation I always give to people. It's one of the most interesting books that I've ever read, very practical around the workplace and what you need to do to stay in the game. Now, I'm not saying this is a game game, but it gives practical advice of what actual workplaces are like. So I would definitely recommend that. So that's by Sally Halgason, How Women Rise. Yeah, that's the one, How Women Rise. So I would completely recommend that book to anybody wanting to get into the workplace.

56:05And there's a really old book that I've read years ago. I don't think it's very modern nowadays, but it's been evolving over the years. It's called Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. It's a really old book. Yeah, but if it's a good book, I mean, you know, the lessons normally last, don't they? Yeah. And some of the references they give, they're a little bit old school, but the idea of it is it's just encouraging people to be a little bit braver. Hence the word Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. It's about sometimes we want to be people pleasers. We just want to keep everybody happy. And actually in a corporate world it does not always work like that so it's just advice on on yeah how you can work in a corporate world so those two would be my recommendations brilliant yeah nice girls don't get the corner office and that is by lois frankel and we'll put both of those books on my daughter's called lois actually you don't see many loises around but we'll put that on the show notes and um that's fantastic um guys thank you so much i've actually learned a lot from this conversation and I actually feel inspired so I think yeah thank you keep up the good work um can I just ask you where can where can people find you and anything in terms of coding for girls and amois if there's any is anything you can mention there so people can reach out to some of the organizations you've benefited from in your journey yeah so I would well I'd promote Next Tech Girls Next Tech Girls is that organization that focuses on helping those who are typically underrepresented in tech and they help people find work experience placements so that definitely is a a good way in to be able to be exposed to so many companies that you wouldn't know about?

57:36Yeah, so Black Valley is a program that this young man created to help people of color get into work. So it looks at people in engineering, tech, product, UX design, and they basically reach out to people in industry like myself who offer to be mentors as part of that program. For anybody wanting to get into tech, I'm not sure how to do it. And we spent, I think it's probably about six months with them to go through what it's what do they need how can we help them be ready for those tech interviews and stuff like that so yeah i would recommend if people want to register it's absolutely free and then you've got people from massively top organizations that volunteer to be mentors to people from from ethnic minority groups fantastic we'll put both of those on the on the show notes thank you so much for your time guys i know you're really busy so we appreciate you talking to us.

58:24Thank you, Gareth. Thank you so much, Gareth. It's been fantastic. Thank you.

58:33Wow, where do I start with this one? We created this episode to primarily discuss the graduate journey and the impact of technology innovation on graduate recruitment in the coming years in light of things like automation and the innovation around AI. And I believe we did do that and it was fantastic. However, I think the conversation around diversity was even more compelling. Both of these ladies speak very well and opened my eyes to a number of things. But Adji was absolutely right. We are shaped by our experience and our perception. Many people find it difficult to think objectively beyond their unique experience.

59:10And that is something which is a learning curve for most of us. So that was a really important point for me. And so I don't want to sort of draw attention just to one specific point, though. I think what is worth drawing attention to here is the sentiment and the theme of what we were talking about. Tesco's customer base is, by default, highly diverse. And if you are going to sell more products and services to that customer base, you have to have a workforce and especially a leadership team that reflects that customer base in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, and also in terms of neurodiversity as well.

59:45It appears that Tesco are leading the way in this respect and are reaping the benefit, which is great to see. And that is what really stood out for me. Thank you so much for joining us. Great guests, great questions, great content. Thank you so much for listening. Please give us a like or subscribe. That would be even better or a review if you can engage in any way. It really helps us. Thank you so much for listening.

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