Twenty years. Three roles. One approach.

Sam Moorhouse, founder and CEO, Turntabl

When Sam Moorhouse joined Morgan Stanley as a graduate in 2006, he had no idea that twenty years later he would have experienced practitioner-led training from almost every possible perspective. First as a graduate. Then as an instructor. Now as a client, for his own company.

The learner

Sam’s Morgan Stanley graduate application had gone in for the Application Development and Integration (AppDevI) track. He knew there was another track, the “distributed” track that was harder, more technical, closer to how the systems he wanted to work on were actually built. He hadn’t put his name down for it.

“I applied for the AppDevI track because I didn’t think I was that good. I thought I was a solid AppDevI candidate.”

When the recruiter called with the offer, she had put him somewhere else.

“She said, ‘we’ve put you on the Distributed track.’ I said, ‘I applied for an AppDevI job. I think I should be an AppDevI.’ And she was like, ‘no, we’ve decided you are wrong.’”

Sam was one of a hundred or so graduates joining Morgan Stanley in London that August, all going into the same Mallon-designed programme. Four months of intensive training in C++, Java, Perl, C# and JavaScript followed.

“When you come out of that program, your ability to ask the right questions, the way you think about technology, the way you think about your own growth is changed and is very, very strong.”

He spent five years working in the London office and another four in Hong Kong. The specific technologies moved on but his way of thinking about how technology works did not.

The instructor

A decade into his career, Sam joined Mallon, not as a graduate this time, but as an instructor for the programme, teaching alongside Paul Storer-Martin and the rest of the Mallon team.

“I went from poacher to gamekeeper. Spent the next four years in front of a classroom in New York, London, Shanghai, Bangalore and Mumbai, all over the world teaching.”

Teaching sharpened his engineering in a way that writing code never had.

“There’s this great secret that we, who have been teachers, talk about in whispers. Teaching makes you a better engineer. Organising your thoughts and formalising your thoughts is a really important process to go through, and normally you wouldn’t.”

By the time Sam left Mallon, two of its principles had become his own. Engineers should be taught by engineers. Admitting you don’t know something is the beginning of learning, and it builds credibility.

“If someone asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, you can say, I don’t know. As long as you go and find out and come back. But don’t lie. Don’t make something up.”

The client

When Sam founded Turntabl in Ghana in 2018, he was trying to prove something he strongly believed.

“Talent is evenly distributed around the world. There are good people everywhere. But there are still pockets of places where opportunity is missing, either because of lack of jobs, access to the internet, or even access to power and infrastructure.”

Turntabl became the practical test of that claim. Find good people in a place where opportunity had been the constraint, train them properly, and see what happens.

For Sam, though, the success comes from training people properly.

“We put these folks in the TLC classroom, and even then it’s a gauntlet. It’s weeks and weeks and weeks of heavy tuition. We have to teach people how to learn, because even just keeping up day by day is really, really challenging. And it’s challenging by design.”

When Turntabl needed to develop its engineers, Sam returned to the programme that had shaped him. Mallon has been Turntabl’s technical training partner ever since.

Every year, someone inside Turntabl asks him if it’s still worth the cost.

“Every year, someone says to me, maybe we should cut this, or maybe we should do less, maybe we should do half, maybe we should do something different, maybe we should do it internally. Every year that happens.”

“Someone once told me the answer. What if we train people and they leave? What if you don’t? And they stay.”

The full circle

Turntabl engineers in Ghana. Image courtesy of Turntabl.

By 2024, Turntabl had been running its own graduate programme for five years. In that same year, two of its most senior engineers joined Mallon and taught alongside the Mallon instructor team on the graduate programme at Morgan Stanley. Both had come through an early TLC cohort and spent several years on client engagements before stepping into the classroom.

In New York and London, engineers Sam had hired and trained in Ghana were now teaching the same fundamentals he had learned as a graduate two decades earlier.

“The best people I work with in Ghana at Turntabl, I would happily put alongside any of the folks that I taught at Morgan Stanley.”

Twenty years earlier, Sam had sat in that classroom as a graduate. Now, engineers he had hired and trained were standing at the front of it.

“The pride that I felt was astronomical. It’s a wonderful, beautiful full circle.”

Key takeaway

The strongest proof of a training programme is not what a graduate remembers at the end of the course. It is what they bring back to it two decades later as a paying client. Sam Moorhouse sat in a Mallon classroom in 2006, taught in Mallon classrooms a decade later, and when he founded Turntabl in Ghana, he brought Mallon back as the technical training partner for his own engineers. In 2024, engineers he had hired and trained in Ghana were teaching alongside Mallon on the same Morgan Stanley graduate programme that had shaped him. One approach. Three roles. Twenty years.