CIOs and IT executives share their latest techniques for retaining top IT talent.

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Identifying and hiring the right IT talent is one of every CIO's most important responsibilities. But if you aren’t able to hold onto that talent, all of your hiring excellence is for naught. Two weeks ago, we asked Heller Report readers to share with us, “What is an action you've taken that is helping you retain your best people?” 

We have compiled your responses below. Please feel free to add to this compendium using the comments section below.


 "My tip for long(er) IT employee tenure is to support your team members' learning aspirations, even if there is no immediate payoff.

As someone who has led a variety of IT and technology focused organizations, talent retention has been top of mind for many years. However, my quandary was "why am I able to retain talent when others have not?" This question transformed into real research in 2010 when I decided to earn my doctorate. Here is what I found:

IT workers stick around for 7 reasons - Learning, People, Pay, Career, Opportunity, Environment, and Organization. My findings helped me resolve the staying quandary by identifying my open access to learning management style as a key contributor to employee retention. I have and do support learning across a variety of skills, even when there is no immediate payoff for the organization. It turns out that while the payoff may not been immediate, it has been direct by allowing my organizations to have IT Worker retention rates measured in years, because months really sounds odd after five years or so."



"We are all “ millennial”, in our own way. We all want to change the world and make a meaningful impact to our company, community and contribute to the evolution of humankind. Our best employees make no exception. The way to retain our best employees is to acknowledge this point. They are looking for growth and greater impact.

Here are a few practical examples:

  1. Always help your best talent connect the dots between their project, the value of the project to the business, and to their resume. Even the most traditional project may provide growth. For example, she can learn how to motivate teams or prove that a traditional waterfall project may become agile. Identify the broader context of work activities, explain it to your employees and transform the concept of "getting the job done” into a work experience.

  2. Encourage your best people to engage in experiences that build cross-functional skills. It could be getting into non-profit and taking on additional projects outside their core area of competence at work. I call this “work hobbies”, which help our talented people get exposed to other areas of the business and figure out what they want to do next, hopefully within your organization or at least within the company.

  3. Create a safe environment that is engaging and fun to work in. Create a culture of celebration for what matters, ask your best employees to develop others and ask them to recognize others for jobs well done. You’ll make them grow as leaders and give them a sense of achievement.

  4. And when they leave, stay in touch and offer to continue to be their mentor. They can always decide to work with or for you again!"


 

IT talent retention"We provide both education (college degrees) and professional/technical training. I currently have 3 employees pursuing Master’s Degrees and 2 working on their Bachelor’s. The technical and professional training can cover a PMP certification (currently 5 on staff), a CAPM (1 presently), CBAP (3), CCNA/CCNP/CCIE (1 CCNP/1 CCNA), .NET training, MSDBA and even administrative assistant training. We encourage attendance at seminars and local conferences and allow people 40 hours of company provided training a year. Some years, people get more and some years less.

Early in my tenure here I fought the battle of “What if we train them and they leave?” with “What if we don’t and they stay?” Interviewees are often surprised we encourage people to make themselves more marketable and pay for it, but by contrast, I have several people on staff with over 20 years at the company. And of those who do leave, several have returned and are still with us."



"Instead of a siloed approach, where the team is disjointed, we have provided them with the big picture, explained how their roles and their work fit in, and how can we collectively achieve the target. This technique has helped us to retain our talent pool and keep them involved. This has also helped us to get some innovative ideas from the team as they see them connected with enterprise vision."


 

"When it comes to talent retention, the things working for me are:

  1. Empowering IT talent by getting them trained in the latest of the product stacks in whatever streams they are in, and

  2. Preparing a career road map for each of the individual talent, which maps organization goals to Individual aspirations."

 



"Even old companies are coming around to new technologies like NoSQL and machine learning, so give employees sidebar projects that expose them to what's new.  Even if it is just a research project, it can be mutually beneficial."



"The action I have taken that is helping me retain our best people is working with each individual to develop a personal development plan and provide the right mix of opportunities to enable its delivery."



"Show that you care about your employees! It makes a difference. Also, find what drives each person and do your best to give them that."



"My SME's are the R&D Team. They evaluate bleeding and cutting edge products and recommend new solutions, in addition to being the Alpha/Beta testers. This was a win-win for numerous reasons, including keeping team members engaged in strategic direction and budgetary challenges while feeding their natural curiosity. It also served as a motivator for more junior team members to strive to senior levels."



"Most young people like to have challenging and meaningful work. Pay is not always the motivator."



"It all boils down to leadership. Cast a vision, share the vision, and enlist people to join the journey to make the vision a reality. Make people feel they’re a part of something extraordinary--something completely different and unique."



"I have found it useful at the end of a successful project to have a senior leader (outside of IT) send a company-wide announcement summarizing the project, the efficiencies/savings gained, and thanking the individual team members (both inside and outside of IT). It's very effective and certainly budget friendly."

 

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