How to Keep Your IT Staff From Leaving?

Given the general shortage of professionals with advanced IT skills, retaining IT employees organizations already have has become a critical priority. The challenge is that there is no shortage of companies trying to poach that IT talent.

While employees will respond differently to various incentives, just about everybody is trying to strike the right work-life balance. As such, all financial considerations being roughly equal, the flexibility of the organization becomes a critical factor in retaining IT talent, Jason Crane, a branch manager for the recruitment firm Robert Half Technology, said.

IT managers should not be lulled into thinking that geography plays a role in helping to retain staff. Most IT professionals are fairly mobile, and salary ranges across job functions are fairly close regardless of geography, because when it comes to IT talent, it’s a global market, he said.

IT managers should be as frank as possible in compensation conversations with their employees if they want to retain them.

“As much as possible it needs to be an open dialogue,” Crane said. “Given the demand, there’s a fair amount of greed.”

Crain will detail the level of competition for IT talent that exists and some of the best practices IT managers can employ to retain their existing talent at the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September.

Of course, how long this situation will be the case is anybody’s guess. Crane noted that just about every organization is investing in automation to get the most of the IT employees they have. One day those investments will affect the balance of supply and demand for IT talent. But for the moment at least, that day still appears to be far in the future.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Jason’s session titled “Latest IT Hiring and Compensation Trends.”