A recurring topic of conversation is the skills shortage in IT. It’s such a talking point that all kinds of organisations have talked about it – it’s probably been at least a discussion in your office, if not an agenda item in strategic discussions.
So what are most of us doing to address it?
Actually, generally, worse than nothing. Many companies bemoan the increasing cost of recruiting people with specific skills and experience, as their use of x technology increases, so does everybody else’s. So the costs go up. We pay more because there is a shortage of supply. We talk about the risks of finding people to run, maintain, develop and improve our platforms; yet we do nothing to address the supply shortage.
If the skills were some kind of widget, we’d be rushing to capitalise by manufacturing or importing these widgets so we could sell them to everybody else. To continue the analogy (weak as it is!); none of want brand new widgets. We want (and need) widgets that have been ‘run in’. We want our widgets to be second or third hand at least.
Abandoning the analogy, and talking in real terms, we don’t want people with newly minted certifications. We want people who understand how to deploy those skills in a practical, commercial, environment. We need people who know that an idea that looks technically sound is actually a waste of time, because people won’t use it, or won’t find it helpful in real terms.
A simple example is password security. We all know that longer, regularly changed, passwords beat complex ones nearly every time. You can teach that in a couple of minutes. But if somebody with a certificate from a 2min course came into your business and enforced 128char passwords changed every 7days… You get the idea!
The real answer comes back right around to one of the most often overlooked recruitment lessons.
Hire for personality and capability. Train for skills.
One of the skills we often try to buy is knowledge and experience. But the reality is that experience isn’t a skill, it’s exposure to things that allow an individual to develop and improve responses. An ability to better predict future outcomes is a positive result of experience.
So, we let people make mistakes at another company, and when they’ve learned from them we’ll snatch them up? Surely they won’t make as many mistakes when they come to us then?
Wrong. We don’t all need to get hit by a bus to know that it’s a bad idea. We get that knowledge from lots of places, but ultimately it’s about education. We learn through lots of routes and sources that we should keep away from buses.
So if we are recruiting people from another company, the quality of that person will depend hugely upon how good that company is at teaching people. If they are great at teaching, it could be a great hire. If they are lousy, the hire may not have benefitted much from the 2yrs experience there (and it could be the reason the candidate is on the market!)
Hopefully the answer is obvious now; Hire great people, train them well. Help them learn and develop. Expose them to new things as often as possible.
You’ll find you have people who don’t want to leave, and a queue of bright applicants any time you need to hire somebody. News travels fast, and companies that genuinely are ‘Great places to work’ have reputations preceding them.
I’ve avoided adding the cliched quote until now, particularly as I couldn’t find an original source to attribute it to. Hopefully I’ve added a little colour to this;
Q. What if we train them and they leave?
A. What if we don’t and they stay?