What is the state of the enterprise IT workplace today?
Employee rotation in and out of IT roles was the theme of the day at Forrester’s Teleconference on the Enterprise IT Career March 19, correlated with more successful recruitment and better worker retention. Yet only a minority of firms embraced these concepts.
Recruitment
While computer science still leads in educational backgrounds of IT professionals, other studies are quickly gaining traction.
When asked what educational backgrounds they recruit from, 90 percent of IT decision-makers in large IT shops (more than 500 employees) and 87 percent in small ones (less than 500 employees) cited computer science programs, followed by a hybrid of computer science and management undergraduate programs (75 and 67 percent, respectively), and 39 in both categories pointed to non-IT majors and backgrounds.
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Though various master’s degrees—Master of Science in technology-related fields, MBA/MIS programs and MBA programs alone—fell further down the recruitment priority list, it was these areas in which large IT shops predominantly focused their efforts.
Forrester researchers found that while IT often complains about the quality of the university programs that produce their recruits, it is fairly passive in its interactions with academia.
Only 43 percent of IT decision-makers surveyed said they participated in job fairs; only 23 percent said they served on advisory boards; an equal percent said they lectured in classrooms and 16 percent sponsored scholarships for students in IT-related majors. Only 12 percent donated technology to universities, or served on curriculum review committees.
Though it may seem innocuous, lack of engagement with higher education was found to have a significant impact on employee turnover. The turnover at firms whose IT leaders served on curriculum review committees was 6 percent, but jumped to 12 percent at firms with no engagement in academia.
Rotation
Rotation in and out of IT jobs remains relatively uncommon at most firms, Forrester research found, likely increasing the isolative nature of IT departments in most companies. Only 22 percent of firms had internal IT rotation and of these, only 11 percent had taken advantage of it in 2005. In terms of IT-to-business rotation, only 12 percent of companies had it, and only 8 percent of their workers participated in it in 2005. Numbers were lowest among business-to-IT rotation, where 7 percent of firms offered it, but only 6 percent actually took advantage in 2005.
Rotation was most common, however, in firms where succession-planning had already taken part on the director level. Those with a list of internal successor pre-identified for consideration, and that could be ramped up in 12 or fewer months, had a 30 percent rotation participation rate, versus 11 percent at those who had not planned successions.
Rotation was also common at companies that hired at the entry level. Twenty-seven percent of those with internal IT rotation were hiring at the entry level versus 10 percent who were not. 14 percent of those with IT-to-business rotation were hiring workers with only basic IT skills, versus 6 percent who were not. Finally, and most abruptly, 11 percent of the firms with business-to-IT rotation hired at the entry level versus zero percent at those which did not.
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