Building a skills legacy in the war for technical talent

Australian chief information officers are staring down the intersecting crises of a massive skills shortage and the heralded ‘great resignation’. It’s never been more difficult to hire new tech workers, while retaining existing staff is becoming increasingly difficult too, compounding the problem. Research by the Tech Council of Australia has found that job vacancy rates in the tech sector are 60% higher than the national average and are still increasing.

But chief information officers (CIOs) in Australian businesses have the tools and talent in their teams to help combat these stress points. By making some affordable and relatively simple changes to workplace practices, Australian businesses can utilise the full potential of their existing experts and empower them to achieve their ambitions.

Expertship — the “insightful application of expertise leading to optimal outcomes” — is a growing philosophy that can help to improve this situation, in turn assisting companies with retaining key staff members and lessening the impact of the global skills shortage.

It is a new way to approach employee potential, and to ensure companies empower employees to utilise and develop skills to master expertship which can improve retention, reduce the need for new, outside skills, and help CIOs to take back control of their expert talent strategy.

According to a recent KPMG report, it’s officially the “era of talent”. The poll of 400 CEOs, emerging leaders and non-executive directors found that talent acquisition, retention and upskilling are the main challenges facing companies in 2022.

The National Skills Commission’s recent annual update revealed the number of occupations experiencing skills shortages in the country almost doubled last year. There are now 286 occupations with national shortages, up from 153 in 2021. The top 10 most in-demand professions include ICT business and systems analysts and software and application programmers.

These in-demand experts encompass a wide range of disciplines within a company, including tech, financial, engineering, scientific, legal, actuarial and manufacturing — everything that not only keeps the lights on, but helps a business innovate and maintain a competitive advantage.

Most businesses already have these workers on staff, but often company structures do not give them the opportunities to advance and develop their careers without managing people. This minimises experts’ ability to influence decision-making and feel they are making a valuable contribution.

While there are many worthy reforms and new policies in the works to address skills shortages, CIOs cannot afford to wait. Unless action is taken to give technical experts more influence and to empower them to perform to their best, they will continue to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities available to them elsewhere.

The ability of a business to attract, train and retain these experts is now a key differentiator and competitive advantage, and crucial in ensuring they weather the increasingly hostile storms in the global economy.

While human resources and management typically have programs to develop people leaders, these usually aren’t designed to support IT staff in their technical career developments. This means that sometimes the experts with the most potential will slip through the cracks.

Traditionally, most organisations haven’t placed their technical specialists in positions of authority and influence. Often when a problem arises, experts will be consulted and asked to provide possible solutions, but they are constrained to being report providers. These reports are taken away by the executive team, who will debate it and decide on the way forward.

This takes the experts out of the discussion and decision-making process, meaning the decisions are being made by those without the full picture and the specific knowledge in the particular field.

Improving technical knowledge transfer within your organisation is vital. This has become increasingly difficult, with higher turnover rates making training more burdensome due to a lack of existing and historical knowledge within an organisation to train new employees. The growing skills gap also means you may not have the right people on your team to naturally move up into open roles within an organisation.

By changing the role of experts within your organisations and embracing expertship, this technical knowledge transfer will flow naturally through technical teams, helping to mitigate the threat of the skills gap and growing the internal pipeline of talent.

It’s time for a step-change in company structures to combat this issue. Technical experts need to be given a seat at the table in decision-making. Too often leadership roles are defined by how many other employees someone is managing, but that is not a good measure of the ability and value that many technical experts can offer. They also may not want to have people management roles.

According to our research, a typical mid-sized business can save up to $825,000 each year just by retaining their existing technical experts. Organisations including Aon, the Victorian Government’s IT agency, Cenitex and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand have all embraced the concept of expertship, to great effect.

Moving to a more outcomes-focused measure of progression should provide experts with a clear career pathway within a business, and will go a long way to retaining them, as well as the valuable knowledge they hold, in the long term.

Image credit: iStock.com/Cecilie_Arcurs