Attracting, growing and retaining our people
In 2025 our People team was focused on optimising the entire hire to retire journey for Thoughtworkers, centering on improving processes and tools and maintaining lifelong connections with our people. We streamlined our onboarding process to ensure a smooth and consistent start for new hires. For graduates and career changers, the journey begins with Thoughtworks University (TWU), our year-long program, which starts with an immersive five-week course in India. By combining cultural immersion with structured skills training, TWU successfully cultivates a close-knit, highly-skilled global community.
"Afterworks," our global alumni network, launched in Q4 and rapidly grew to over 3,200 members, providing ongoing shared learning, connection and return opportunities.
Our people are remarkable and we want to ensure they thrive at Thoughtworks. To support their continuous growth and develop exceptional leaders, we:
Focused our Learning and Development in specialized Academies, empowering Thoughtworkers to build future-ready capabilities.
Rolled out a Performance Partner initiative, to maximize the effectiveness of over 3,000 Performance Partners globally.
Centered inclusive behavior in all of our leadership programs.
What Thoughtworkers say
Our annual DEI & engagement survey
Training and development
Safety and wellbeing
Ensuring our people feel supported, safe and able to do their best work means prioritising wellbeing and connection. We have literally thousands of communities, from self-organized games-night gatherings to the daily conversation in the entire-company chat space. Support, solidarity, ideas, challenge and advice are all openly requested and shared. Wellbeing is also supported more formally at the regional, country and office level through our workplace experience and people teams, in conjunction with our benefits providers.
Code of Conduct
Our Code of Conduct helps us create and sustain the culture which makes Thoughtworks special. It serves as a guide for navigating the complexities of the modern world while staying true to our identity, and living our values. It helps us make ethical decisions and uphold respect, integrity and responsibility for our actions.
The Code of Conduct includes:
- Health and safety policy.
- Workplace harassment policy.
- DEI policy.
- Equal pay and opportunities policy.
- Annual mandatory training for all employees
- Mandatory agreement for all suppliers.
If the behaviors outlined in the Code are not followed, we encourage speaking up, with anonymous options including an independent integrity helpline and clear protection from fear of retaliation. Our Speak Up Policy details the process and paths available.
Processes for the future
As a professional services business, the connection between our people’s skills and client opportunities is the heartbeat of our organization. In 2025 development was completed for a new platform, our Talent Marketplace. Designed with three connected AI agents, the marketplace introduces efficiencies; makes roles and opportunities more transparent, and gives Thoughtworkers more control as they navigate their careers and growth paths.
Every Leadership development cohort at Thoughtworks is representative of our population and includes deep learning on inclusion. In 2025 we evolved our Global Leadership course into the NextGen leadership program. This program is laser-focused on identifying CXO successors, and in 2025 was 53% gender diverse. In addition, we continued our Beyond program, which was created to support diverse leadership pipelines. Over 200 participants in LATAM have completed the program to date. Coaching, mentoring programs and masterclasses on leading distributed teams were also developed and rolled out.
In 2025 we updated our capability model and grade promotion guidelines to ensure that every Thoughtworker has the same opportunities and clarity about their career paths and next steps. We also invested in ongoing support for our Performance Partners, the 1000+ Thoughtworkers who manage and are responsible for overseeing and supporting the career trajectories of others.
AI/works™ is Thoughtworks’ intelligent platform that integrates the entire software development lifecycle. In 2025 we established a dedicated product organization; the AI/works™ team balances rigor and innovation, incorporating security by design and composable systems that allow organizations to pivot and scale without friction. Opportunities for Thoughtworkers to innovate and collaborate abound in this space and we are intentionally building a diverse team to do just that, with current W/GD representation at 41%. Because diversity is crucial to innovation.