How to Build a Strong and Resilient IT Bench

When they refer to “bench strength” in sports, they’re talking about the ability of a less skilled player to step in and play a big role if a main performer is unavailable. For years, IT leaders have wanted bench strength. However, those leaders found that achieving bench strength has been an elusive goal in tight job markets.  

Is there a way you can develop a bench? Yes, IT can develop bench strength. 

The first step is to identify the talent shortfalls in IT, where most CIOs will find the following gaps: 

In the infrastructure category, one cause of declining bench strength is baby boomer retirements. Computer skillsets have systematically been abstracted from newer IT workers, who now work through point and click GUIs (graphical user interfaces) to provision, monitor and manage infrastructure resources. Unfortunately, the more highly abstracted IT tools that newer workers use don’t always get to the bottom of a bug in system infrastructure software. That bug could bog down a hotel reservation system resulting in loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bookings per hour. For this, you need “down to the metal” skills, which boomers have excelled at.  

Related:How to Build an Effective IT Mentoring Program

The net result for IT managers and CIOs is that they find themselves short in new skill areas such as AI, but also in the older IT disciplines that their shops must continue to support, and that younger IT’ers aren’t exposed to. 

Setting Your Bench Strength Targets 

Since talent is likely to be short in new technology areas and in older tech areas that must still be supported, CIOs should consider a two-pronged approach that develops bench strength talent for new technologies while also ensuring that older infrastructure technologies have talent waiting in the wings. 

Here are five talent development strategies that can strengthen your bench: 

Partnering with schools that teach the skills you want. Companies that partner with universities and community colleges in their local areas have found a natural synergy with these institutions, which want to ensure that what they teach is relevant to the workplace.  

This synergy consists of companies offering input for computer science and IT courses and also providing guest lecturers for classes. Those companies bring “real world” IT problems into student labs and offer internships for course credit that enable students to work in company IT departments with an IT staff mentor. 

Related:Jumping the IT Talent Gap: Cyber, Cloud, and Software Devs

The internships enable companies to audition student talent and to hire the best candidates. In this way, IT can sidestep a challenging job market and bring new skills in areas like AI and edge computing to the IT bench.  

There are even universities that teach “down to the metal” skills at the behest of their corporate partners. The IBM Academic Initiative, which teaches students mainframe software skills, is one example. 

Using internal mentors. I once hired a gentleman who was two years away from retirement because he 1) had invaluable infrastructure skills that we needed; and 2) he had expressed a desire to “give back” to younger IT employees he was willing to mentor. He assigned and supervised progressively more difficult “real world” projects to staff.  By the time he left, we had a  
“bench” of three or four persons who could step in. 

Not every company is this fortunate, but most have experienced personnel who are willing to do some mentoring. This can help build a bench. 

Use consultants and learn from them. At times in my CIO career, I hired consultants who possessed specialized technology skills where we lacked experience. When my staff and I evaluated consultants for these assignments, we graded them on three parameters:  

Related:Hiring Hi-Tech Talent by Kickin’ It Old School

1) Their depth and relevance of knowledge for the project we wanted done;  

2) Their ability to document their work so that someone could take over when their work was complete; and  

3) Their ability and willingness to train an IT staff member. Getting the project done was a foremost goal, but so was gaining bench strength.  

Give people meaningful project experience. It’s great to send people to seminars and certification programs, but unless they immediately apply what they learned to an IT project, they’ll soon forget it. 

Mindful of this, we immediately placed newly trained staff on actual IT projects so they could apply what they learned. Sometimes a more experienced staff member had to mentor them, but it was worth it. Confidence and competence built quickly.  

Retain the employees you develop. CIOs lament about employees leaving a company after the company has invested in training them. In fact, the issue became so prominent at one company that the firm created a training “vesting plan” whereby the employee had to reimburse the company for a portion of training expenses if they left the company before a certain prescribed time.  

A better way to retain employees is by regularly communicating with them, giving them a sense of belonging that makes them feel part of the team, assigning them to meaningful work, and rewarding them with paths to advancement and salary increases. 

Summary Remarks 

Companies (and employees) continuously change, and there is no guarantee that IT departments will always be able to retain their most competent performers. Consequently, it’s critical to develop employees, to actively and continuously engage with them, and to foster an open and pleasant working experience. 

By doing so, CIOs can improve staff skill agilities in their organizations and be ready for the next tech breakthrough.