We write a lot about top talent. That’s because everyone wants top talent. Who wants to hire average talent, right?  It’s not that top talent is elusive – it’s always out there. You just have to know where to find it – and with our extensive network of IT professionals – Agile does. The need to hire and retain top talent is nothing new; it’s not a result of the Great Recession.  But changes within IT organizations – due in part to the weakened economy – have intensified the need for top IT talent – especially top talent with high-demand skills.

Top talent possessing specific IT skills like Java, .NET, business analysis, SQL, Oracle DBMS, and project management is scarce. All indications suggest that these workers will become even harder to find as the economy improves and IT departments continue to fill vacant and newly-formed positions. So what can technology leaders do today to build and sustain an “A” team?

We recently published a white paper “Four Winning Talent Strategies for the New IT” that includes a section advising companies to use newly allocated funds for training purposes. What follows is an excerpt from the paper that provides several training approaches organizations should consider to ensure employees have the high-demand skills necessary to stay competitive.   

One legacy of the Great Recession is that many companies have scaled back if not eliminated training and professional development activities.  Training can actually represent a lower expense than recruiting a new employee, which human resources experts calculate can cost as much as 1.5 times the departing employee’s salary.

You may even want to adopt a “pipeline” approach to staffing similar to the one employed by Zappos, one of the world’s most successful online retailers. The Zappos philosophy, which is detailed in CEO Tony Hsieh’s “Delivering Happiness,” is to build a pipeline of people with varying levels of skills and experience to meet the needs of each of its departments. By keeping the pipeline full and continuously offering training to all employees, they are able to constantly transition highly qualified individuals to more senior and demanding roles.

This strategy means the company is never exposed if a key individual moves on. At its core, the pipeline philosophy emphasizes recruiting individuals who are a good fit for the company’s culture and its ongoing commitment to employee training and development.

With the current scarcity of “ideal” candidates, we advise our clients to consider a more long-term approach to nurturing the employee through training. Priority should go to valued employees, of course. Individuals who are challenged by their work (while also seeing their professional marketability improved through ongoing training) are more likely to maintain loyalty to an organization even as other firms are trying to recruit them away.

We also recommend providing advanced technical and business analytics training for new employees on a case-by-case basis.  As organizations compete for talent, we think it will become much more difficult to identify “ideal” candidates for an increasing number of job titles. In some cases, it may make sense to hire the most promising individual and then use intensive training to bridge shortfall in skills or knowledge.

You can download the entire white paper by clicking here.