Ignore what motivates people in their jobs and they'll eventually leave. Our IT Salary Survey provides data you can use to cultivate your top performers.
- Two out of every five IT pros are looking for a new job, our 2012 U.S. IT Salary Survey data shows. Are you counting on high unemployment, or maybe that rickety foosball table in the lunchroom, to keep your best people from leaving?
- IT leaders have the advantage here, and not only because of the shaky job market. Most of those IT job seekers are only casually looking, and based on how highly our data shows they value job stability, they'd rather stay where they are. So if IT leaders understand the few, critical job elements that matter to their employees, they have a good shot at retaining them.
- So let's look at two data sets from our survey: what matters most to IT pros in their jobs and, for the 39% who say they're actively or casually looking for a job, why they're looking. You can find more details in our slideshow and in the charts below, so I'll just make a few comments on why people leave and what matters most and least to them. Feel free to share your own analysis in the comments section.
- 1. Why people leave: money, and ...
- Higher pay's by far the top reason people are looking for a new job (cited by 70%). No shocker--fall behind the going rate for compensation, and people walk. But half of staffers and 42% of managers are also looking for more interesting work, and slightly more than 40% are looking for more personal fulfillment. About 30% want more responsibility. More than half of all survey respondents said they'd consider a lower-paying job for more job satisfaction.
- [ Want more on IT careers? Read 2012 IT Salary Survey: 12 Career Insights. ]
- One of the most interesting reasons for looking for a new job, cited by 41% of staffers and managers, is disliking the company's management or culture. That finding is particularly interesting when you consider that culture is way down the list of what's most important to employees (cited by just 19% of staffers) and effectiveness of immediate supervisor is even less important (14%). Perhaps employees don't necessarily seek out a great culture or manager, but when those things go wrong, they can drive them away.
- 2. What matters most: pay, stability, influence, and ...
- For managers, the top priority is having their opinion and knowledge valued--a few points ahead of pay, challenge, and stability. For staffers, the top factors are pay, stability, benefits, flexible work schedule, having their knowledge valued, challenge, and vacation. Look at that list. How many of those things does the CIO have free rein over? Valuing knowledge and challenge, and to a lesser degree the work schedule. Things like pay, benefits, and vacation are all part of larger corporate policies, so CIOs need to cultivate a strong partnership with their HR colleagues to keep their best people
What Matters Little
- 3. What matters surprisingly little: leading-edge tech, promotions, culture ...
- Potential for promotion is cited by only 18% of staffers and managers. As mentioned earlier, company culture isn't hugely important (19% of staff). My guess is workers don't care about "culture" per se--a culture of valuing people matters only if it results in good pay and benefits and flexible work schedules, which rate high on the "what matters" list. But in terms of actions CIOs can take, look at two other data points that rate low on the importance scale.
- The first is that neither staffers nor managers are all that worried about their work being important to the company. This is interesting: IT pros find it very important that their opinion and knowledge are valued, but they aren't very worried about their work being important to the company's success. For IT staffers, the percentage that cited each of these factors as important are:
- My opinion and knowledge are valued: 40%
- My work (job) is important to the company's success: 22%
- It's not necessarily that IT pros don't care about contributing to company success. It's that the contribution matters only if they're recognized for that effort. People don't get an inherent "I helped the team" warm-and-fuzzy; they get it from "I helped the team, and the coach knows it." It's the age-old need for CIOs to recognize good work.
- The second point is that working with leading-edge technology and creating innovative IT solutions rank low in what matters to employees--each with only 21%. We like to think of techies as always jumping on the latest and greatest, but the data suggests not everyone's wired for that degree of change.
This finding doesn't mean IT leaders needn't worry about keeping people on fresh projects. For a healthy segment of tech pros, "new" is their drug, and if you deprive them, they'll find it somewhere--either by pushing new things inside your company, or going elsewhere if that approach is discouraged. We tend to think of craving the "latest and greatest" as part of the IT pro DNA--the data suggests it isn't. So CIOs can't presume that most IT pros they approach with a hot new project will do cartwheels over the chance. And if CIOs are recruiting for someone to constantly do this kind of "latest and greatest" work, they need to screen carefully.
Ref:informationweek