First, make the case. Tooling into the CIO's office and announcing that a full-bore professional development plan is a good idea will go over like a lead balloon. Professional development is neither cheap nor easy. You need to spend some time enumerating what such a plan can do for the business.
The most obvious benefit is staff retention. Our small reader poll for this article showed that job growth is just as important as monetary compensation to 70 percent of respondents--and even in a tough job market, two-thirds would likely look for another job if their present positions didn't offer professional growth. With more than 90 percent saying a professional growth plan would make them more likely to stay with their company, managers can feel good about implementing one as a retention strategy.
Besides, turnover costs the bottom line. "It does cost money to lose people, significantly more than it takes to train them and retain them," says Deb Turner, senior HR executive at an international market research firm and a former IT recruiter for a Fortune 500 financial services company. The conventional wisdom is that it costs about twice the salary amount to replace somebody, she says. A good development plan shows IT employees that significant time and effort are being devoted to their success--that is, the company cares.
A good plan also can provide better customer service. The IT aphorism, "You can be incompetent or you can be unpleasant, but not both," while amusing, isn't really true: Customers want someone who can treat them right and solve their problems. Indeed, this point is tied to morale.
"IT employees are usually overwhelmed with work and often have difficult, demanding customers who want it fixed now," says Peggy Morrow, a customer-service consultant and author. "If they're working in a demotivating atmosphere, they will tend to be short with customers and treat them rudely."
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
