How to Retain and Improve Your IT Staff Simultaneously - Bruce F. Webster: Looking to the Future
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Now on to the second issue: looking to the future. A major
concern – perhaps the major concern –
of your best IT engineers and managers is the fear of becoming obsolete. Some
new technology, programming language, methodology or operating system comes
out, and they want to learn about it. More than that, they want to be
sufficiently familiar with it so that they could work with it if necessary.
So help them. Have as a staff benefit – possibly tied to
performance and/or position – a certain annual budget for travel and
registration for technical conferences and/or training seminars of the
employee’s choice. If you’re worried
about the employee using the benefit and then leaving, set forth a pro-rated
reimbursement schedule – say, over a six- or twelve-month period.
Now, the usual argument against such a benefit is, “If I
train the employees in these technologies, they’ll just leave for a better job
elsewhere.” This ignores several truths.
First, if you don’t provide such an
opportunity, then your best people will almost certainly leave in order to
learn those new technologies elsewhere – leading to what I’ve termed the “Dead
Sea Effect” (your best employees depart, leaving behind the less talented
IT workers).
Second, if you don’t
provide such an opportunity, your IT group as a whole will stagnate due to the
lack of new ideas, practices, and technologies, regardless of whether anyone
leaves. Finally, if you do provide
such an opportunity and your people leave anyway, you almost certainly have other
problems within your IT group (or your organization overall) – which is
valuable feedback.
Study the past; learn about the future. If you do that as an
IT organization, you will constantly improve as an IT organization. You will
attract and keep great personnel; you will reduce overruns and failures; and
you will be in a position to leverage new methods and technologies as
appropriate. Those organizations that do neither will find themselves stuck in
the tar pits of IT.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Bruce
F. Webster is an international IT consultant. You can reach him at
bwebster@bfwa.com or via his websites at
brucefwebster.com and
bfwa.com.
© Bruce F. Webster 2008
IT Management 
