How to stop the IT brain drain
I recently wrote a piece in Computing magazine about the need for organisations to value their IT staff to stop the IT brain drain. Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey highlighted this as the third most pressing issue for CIOs.
I touched on the issue of the exodus of experienced talent as a result of people reaching retirement age in significant volumes for the first time in the industry. This is a serious problem. Some IT veterans will suggest that it serves the industry right because they perceive the industry as ageist, which broadly speaking it is.
The Y2K challenge involved paying inordinate sums to IT staff that were previously considered as ‘over the hill’. In the same way as freak weather is becoming less unusual, the frequency of Y2K-like imminent disasters will increase in frequency. Again creating a gold rush opportunity for those that are retired either by choice or because their skills were no longer deemed fashionable.
Smart CIOs in my opinion will avoid such costly perturbations in their talent costs and make every effort to reskill and redeploy their experienced staff as one never knows when they will be needed to get the IT department out of a (deep technical) hole.
*Photo by spierzchala on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
