Interview: Rose Ulldemolins, Tech School lead at Embark, part of Lloyds Banking Group

Tech boss aiming to foster diverse pipeline of talent with Dundee skills hub.

“You see a change in people, where at first, they might question themself, they might not have the confidence, and they might not have the technical ability yet,” says Rose Ulldemolins, who is embarking on a new phase of her career, spearheading a fintech teaching initiative. The tech expert explains that, having previously taught coding, it’s highly rewarding to see people start to get a real grip on what they’re learning and then secure roles in, say software-development. “I'm a strong believer that anyone can learn to programme, anyone can learn tech, as long as they've got the right support.”

She is leading The Tech School, an initiative launched in November by financial services firm Embark Group to create a pipeline of high-value technology roles. The business, which since 2022 has been part of Bank of Scotland owner Lloyds Banking Group, has created the facility at its base in Dundee’s West Marketgait as it seeks to help create a financial hub outside the Central Belt.

And Ulldemolins seems to have manifested the role, having previously said her dream job would involve teaching people to code from scratch, supporting them as others had supported her, and help them overcome barriers she has faced. The venture initially recruited 12 graduates and career-changers into junior software-developer roles, with a view to helping address the longstanding tech sector industry bugbear of skills and recruitment challenges.

The tech boss wants to help create 'happy, confident, comfortable, and good engineers'. Picture: Lisa Ferguson.

The firm behind the tech school says one in ten new job openings in the UK is now technology-related, but a study by Gigged:AI found that 90 per cent of UK firms said they were experiencing a tech skills shortage to some extent. And Embark has praised Ulldemolins’ “first-rate expertise and experience”, adding that she has been “on an almost identical career trajectory” to the Dundee Tech school’s students – but she hadn’t initially even had tech on her radar as a career option.

The Scottish-based tech expert who is originally from Sheffield had joined banking giant Lloyds aged 18 in a contact centre role, “and really loved that because it was customer facing”. After a year she went to university to study maths, adding that she “always had this passion for logical thinking and being able to get something that's the correct answer”. That would prove a good fit when she was signed by Lloyds’ graduate scheme with a spell working as an analyst, joining in-house “little coding clubs” that she says had a welcoming atmosphere.

The company offered to sponsor her to retrain as a software engineer, and return to the same team in a new role, an opportunity she “grabbed with both hands”, and undertook a ten-week course with CodeClan, the Scottish digital skills academy that caused shockwaves in the tech sector when it folded last year.

She then worked as a front-end engineer, which involves building everything the banking customer sees on a screen, including what they see when they use its app, and ensuring it’s fit for purpose. She then became a full-stack developer, which also involves programming “everything that happens in the background, for example pulling the data when a customer asks for their bank balance.

'I'm a strong believer that anyone can learn to programme, anyone can learn tech, as long as they've got the right support,' says Ulldemolins. Picture: Lisa Ferguson.

However, working as the only female engineer in one team, and not seeing any senior digital roles held by women, for example, “sparked a bit of a passion in me for trying to improve diversity in tech”. That saw her start teaching female and non-binary employees to learn to code, which made her realise that she loved both the tech and the people sides of her job, and she became engineering community lead, while also joining an internal Lloyds network called Women ConnecTech that has grown to more than to 1,500 members.

Ulldemolins in her Masters in Software Systems dissertation highlighted a quote from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg stating: “The word ‘female’, when inserted in front of something, is always with a note of surprise…. One day there won’t be female leaders. There will just be leaders.” The Tech School lead says the quote really struck a chord, “because I don't want to be ‘a woman in tech’, I want to be a successful leader in tech… it should be normal for women to be in tech”.

Lloyds says women make up around half of the UK workforce, but less than a quarter of tech roles. And report from McKinsey calculated that if Europe could double the share of women in the tech workforce to about 45 per cent by 2027, it could boost gross domestic product to up to €600 billion (£514bn). “I do a lot of mentoring for women earlier in their career, to try to break down those barriers and just change that view by being visible, being vocal about it, and taking people along on that journey,” says Ulldemolins.

There are other barriers she is trying to tackle, including socio-economic disparities, stating: “I was once told my accent was too strong to get into a top university”. And early in her career she had “bad impostor syndrome… I didn't feel like I fitted in”, but realised the sector is not just open to the stereotype of a tech worker, and, having been supported along the way, now wants to pay it forward.

Dundee based financial services firm Embark Group (Embark) launches a brand new training facility in the city w

The Tech School aims to plug participants into the Embark business in Dundee for the long term, and Ulldemolins (whose name is of Catalonian origin) is “really excited” to think about their potential. “My goal is for them to go into their roles at Embark and be happy, confident, comfortable, and good engineers, so that they can start adding value to their teams from the get-go.” The aim is also to use this as a blueprint that can be used around the UK, showing that people “can be really successful – as long as they've got the right support network behind them”.