The Tech Talent Shortage is Real.
This is what you should be doing to hire and retain your talent
In June 2021, we held an online event “Scaling R&D teams with the Tech Radar” as part of our Israeli R&D leaders forum. This blog post summarizes the conclusions from this event.
TL;DR
The problem: The Tech Talent Shortage is real, and it is here to stay
The solution: Design a tech career journey in your organization to hire and retain talent.
The tech industry is experiencing one of the most significant tech talent shortages it has ever seen. This shortage is not new, of course, but there are possibly a few reasons why it has gotten so severe in the past few months, as outlined in the Forbes article by Larry English from June 2021:
- Covid-19 seems to have had an unprecedented accelerating effect on technology adoption, with teams learning to work remotely and connecting with clients virtually.
- Global enterprises with unlimited funds such as Google and Facebook are opening new R&D centers or expanding their existing ones, offering hundreds of positions to seniors at imaginary salaries.
- Many Israeli startups have matured and either raised significant funding or launched successful IPOs.
These conditions caused an extraordinary talent shortage in the Israeli tech market. Companies are doing above and beyond to come up with creative ways to retain their talents and recruit new players:
- Upskilling programs are being developed for employees and candidates
- Reskilling employees that are already in the organization
- Expanding the pool of talent by turning to alternative sectors
- Creating global outreach
- Providing benefits such as flexibility, remote work, and personal development, rather than higher salaries.
Many people are looking first and foremost for a place where they can grow and develop their skills.
In an article published by Pluralsight back in 2017, it was found that 45% were concerned about their lack of opportunities for advancement, and 70% of employees were dissatisfied with future career opportunities.
Losing talent means losing knowledge, productivity and creates stress within the organization. And, of course, when you lose talent, you are also losing money.
This means that we need to come up with creative ways to retain talent and recruit new employees in which we see the potential to become tech leaders one day.
The Tech Career Model: Upskilling and Reskilling
The model suggests that the organization develops a tech career model enhancing technological and interpersonal skills.
The training process is connected to the stages of learning, based on the idea that knowledge manifestation encourages individuals to deepen their understanding of the knowledge they’ve acquired.
The model has two primary dimensions: reskilling and upskilling.
From entry-level to tech lead, the organization should provide a clear professional and self-development path in every part of the tech career.
Entry-Level — The vicious circle
The Challenge: There are many entry-level training programs and boot-camps for people who want to enter the industry. However, most companies require some experience, which creates a vicious cycle that doesn’t allow juniors to gain experience.
The organizations: While it is understandable that organizations are reluctant to hire junior engineers due to their lack of experience and time-consuming training, it is also possible to consider them a long-term investment.
The solution: Companies should invest in making them more independent, by providing interpersonal and technological skills and exposing them to the latest trends in technology as part of their personal roadmap, they will quickly contribute back to the organization.
Juniors should also be encouraged to participate in community events and meetups as a way of keeping up to date.
Engineers — Keep the flame going
The Challenge: The main challenge for experienced engineers is staying up-to-date. This is either due to the fact that they’ve been working in the same place for a few years, or their technology was outdated, to begin with. When you are focused on working on one product, it’s hard to see the big technology picture.
The organizations: Organizations might be reluctant to recruit these experienced engineers because they are behind. They require reskilling, and it might take them time to become productive.
The solution: Training programs that position experienced engineers as experts in their domain. Unlike bootcamp programs which are dedicated to learning something new from scratch, the procamp allows engineers to focus and become more proficient in specific relevant technologies. Their roadmaps should be dedicated to developing stronger technology and interpersonal skills, and growing in their field of expertise.
The Tikal way: We realized that experienced engineers are failing the recruitment process due to knowledge gaps in today’s most relevant technologies.
Therefore we opened a procamp training program for DevOps (and soon for Frontend) in order to train experienced engineers and match their skills and level of expertise in the most relevant technologies. The program includes frontal learning and many hours of hands-on and shadowing experienced engineers.
But it doesn’t stop there. In order to stay updated, we also have group roadmaps and encourage learning and staying relevant by participating in meetups and giving lectures both inside and outside the organization.
Seniors — Retention, Retention, Retention
The challenge: As engineers become more experienced, they start getting tempting offers and retention becomes an issue.
The organizations: We’ve already established that personal development is important for many people, and if they feel they have a place to grow in the organization, they will stay. This means that organizations must build a plan for them connected to their personal goals to create a win-win situation.
The solution: encouraging senior engineers to become influential leaders. By participating in Tech Design courses, the engineers deepen their professional knowledge, learn craftsmanship and adapt feature-planning skills. In addition, The senior engineer’s Roadmap process should encourage them to try out new strategies with their teams to create impact and also contribute to the tech community by initiating events and contributing to open source projects.
The Tikal Way: In our Tech Design course we teach how to plan new features and introduce them to the team. The personal roadmap plans are aligned with the Tech Radar and employees take on personal tasks to help them prepare for their next client. By preparing and giving talks and workshops in our Meetup events, they deepen their understanding of the things they learn.
Tech Lead — Being a Hands-On Leader
The Challenge: The main challenge with retaining tech leads is that some of them want to remain hands-on, while in most organizations, at their level of seniority they are offered management positions.
The Organizations: Tech leads are very significant for the organization because they hold a vast amount of knowledge about the technology of the product and they also serve as mentors inside the company.
The solution: The most important aspect of tech leadership programs is to allow them to learn how to carry out processes in the organization. Internal tech lead programs allow experts to identify their unique strengths, learn architecture and lead changes.
Their Roadmap should encourage them to make technology-based business decisions, take action and make an impact. In addition, employees should be encouraged to open discussion groups or small communities in their field of expertise in order to expand their circles of influence and have a positive impact on their personal branding and the company’s employer branding.
The Tikal way: we are currently running the 11 tech lead course these days. This is our longest training course and we only open it once a year. Initially this was an architecture training course, and it was purely technical. Throughout the years, the course evolved to include interpersonal and leadership skills as well. We put a strong emphasis on interpersonal skills such as influence without authority, presentation skills and more. During the course, we try to identify together with the employee what their natural personal strengths are, and we try to bring these qualities forward. These things usually don’t come naturally so it can be a long process to identify the qualities that we want to bring forward. We received very positive feedback from our employees throughout the years about this course, for example: “This is one of the best courses I’ve taken in my entire career. Following the course, I was assigned as tech lead in one of our clients’ dev teams, and since then, the team not only succeeded, it became the strongest group in the organization. The course gave me tools to build better interpersonal skills and clearly convey my ideas. And more importantly, because a leader and decision-maker and not just follow to instructions”
To conclude, as we see the tech talent shortage surge, organizations must come up with creative ways to retain their employees, while recruiting promising juniors and training them. This is not a new problem that we are dealing with but rather a prolonged situation that is enhanced due to the penetration of new players in the market, whether they are large corporations that offer shiny and tempting salaries and perks, or promising startups and unicorns. But if we take a close look at our real talents, the reason for them to stay is if we can give them professional benefits that they cannot get anywhere else. For this reason, we need to have a good understanding of the market and also of the personal goals of every employee. Only if our talents feel that they can develop themselves in the organization, they won’t be tempted to leave for a few more bucks.
