Why more than half of IT leaders may be looking for a new job

Two new studies warn that more than half of IT leaders are actively looking for a new job, in part because they are dissatisfied with the amount of C-level support they and their technical organizations are receiving.

According to A a survey of 3,300 decision makers by order of ManageEngine, Zoho’s enterprise IT management division. ManageEngine used a market research agency Vanson Bourne to conduct a global study that included IT and other key business functions of a number of private sector organizations.

A second survey which collected nearly 8,000 responses from IT executives and employees, found that more than half (53%) are “very” or “somewhat likely” to look for a new job in the next year. This is a study from an online learning site Skillsoftsaid that the respondents were affected by the lack of staff and wanted to earn and study more.

Research by ManageEngine found that nearly 81% of IT decision makers believe their company should have supported them more in the past two years. And almost half said they would leave their current organization if flexible working was no longer offered (48%) or if there was no potential for career growth (45%).

“While IT departments have been heralded as the technology champions of the pandemic, their authority and autonomy to make business decisions is lacking due to the constraints of the C-Suite,” according to the ManageEngine study.

At the same time they have fewer opinions, 88% of North American business and technology leaders believe that IT has more responsibility for business innovation than ever. Another 85% said IT could drive even more innovation if it had a stronger leadership position.

“To a large extent, IT departments are more valuable today than they were before the pandemic for a few key reasons,” said Vijay Sundaram, Zoho’s chief strategy officer. Challenges related to new compliance, privacy and cybersecurity requirements are at an “all-time high,” he said.

For example, violation of EU regulations General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can lead to fines over $800 million. “This is an examination [for compliance] resides in IT organizations,” Sundaram said.

Difference between “watch and leave”

Amy Loomis, vice president of IDC’s Future of Work practice, said that while she didn’t have “specific quantitative data,” the numbers from the two surveys seemed high. “Seeking and leaving are two different issues, and a lot will change over the next few months, so the situation is very volatile,” Loomis said via email. “I can confidently say that, based on my conversations with senior executives, they are acutely aware of the value of IT workers and leaders.”

The question executives should be asking is what it takes to retain IT leaders and make them feel like they have a seat at the executive table, Loomis added.

Sundaram agreed that his company’s survey data “seems really high,” although he had no previous research to compare it to.

A Skillsoft report notes that frustration among IT managers stems from the inability to fill key positions. The study found that 63% of IT leaders failed to fill at least three positions in the past year. The Skillsoft report says the 63% figure is still a major challenge, down 10% from 2021.

“The pace of digital transformation and the lack of sufficient technical resources have pushed many IT professionals to the point of burnout,” Skillsoft said. “Together, these trends are fueled record talent turnover rates in all industries. A Skillsoft report shows that the two biggest challenges facing IT leaders are employee retention and recruiting. Therefore, organizations need to take proactive steps to change their culture so that employees feel satisfied, engaged and motivated.”

The “Great Resignation” continues

After the global pandemic, workers quit their jobs en masse, and this phenomenon is called Great Resignation. Every month for more than a year in the US, more than 4 million workers according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, were quitting their jobs.

Some of the top reasons workers are quitting this year include being unhappy with how their employer has treated them during the pandemic (19%), poor pay or no benefits (17%) and lack of work-life balance (13%), according to a survey by the job site Joblist.

Another factor that accounts for the high rate of resignation is the feeling of professional impasse. Survey conducted by an employee management platform provider Lattice showed that 43% of respondents believe that their career path has either stalled or slowed down. This trend is particularly relevant for younger employees, with 38% of Gen Z workers (born after 1997) looking for jobs with more transparency around career paths and development, according to the survey.

According to SkillSoft, 80% of respondents indicated that skills gaps pose a high or medium risk to their team’s ability to achieve their goals.

additionally:

• The main reasons behind these gaps are difficulty recruiting qualified candidates (44%); employee retention (33%); and insufficient spending on education (26%).
• The three most challenging areas to find skilled talent are cloud computing; analytics, big data and data science; and cyber security.

On a positive note, 59% of IT departments expect budget increases next year (up from 26% in 2021), with cloud computing, security, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

According to Sundaram, the lack of support from IT managers and employees may have more to do with the democratization of IT than anything else. In other words, companies can more often find solutions to technical problems outside the IT organization in the form of cloud services, third-party solution providers and low-code or no-code software.

“Similarly, business units often have technology requirements that require quick action—a new analytics feature or an integration with another application or data source—and the time frame doesn’t allow IT to hand off work and fall in line,” Sundaram said. . “Another reason the IT department may feel unsupported is that they may not have the right skills for new emerging needs.”

Business decision makers seemed to disagree with IT managers about how much discretion they have in the organization. In the U.S. and Canada, they said their IT teams are most often asked for advice on finance (53%), security (52%) and strategy (51%). Another three-quarters (76%) said their IT teams have full or considerable authority to prevent business decisions based on security and technical issues.

Meanwhile, non-IT departments have the autonomy to acquire software and IT software (54%), facilitate IT audits (52%), purchase devices (45%) and hire technical specialists (48%) , according to ManageEngine. Additionally, while nearly all North American respondents said their organizations had implemented a flexible work model, four in 10 reported that they were not consulted enough or at all as their organization moved toward this workforce model.

Leaders must listen

The key to eliminating discontent among IT leaders, according to a ManageEngine report, is for executives to simply listen and respond to some relatively simple needs. IT leaders simply want more opportunities to learn and grow within their current organizations.

When asked what they most want from their role in the next five years, 45% of IT decision-makers said they want to learn new skills, and another 41% said they want to be able to lead change in the organization, according to in the ManageEngine report. .

“This aligns with how they see IT developing in their companies over the next five years; they believe that IT should play a greater role in developing strategies for organizations,” according to the ManageEngine report.

“Our research found that there is a growing demand for certain skills and, accordingly, IT professionals with these skills are earning higher salaries,” the report said.

A few examples of highly in-demand skills include cloud, data science and IT infrastructure, all of which saw significant salary increases this year, according to ManageEngine.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and other automation generally require IT know-how, “regardless of where these technologies are deployed,” Sundaram said. “The bottom line: IT expertise will be paramount, regardless of how an organization’s IT department is set up…centralized, decentralized, or hybrid.”

Executives should also encourage IT leaders to reorganize their departments to best meet business demands, he said, suggesting a hybrid model in which a central IT department handles some IT projects and others are handled by IT staff embedded within the business. subdivisions.

He said the IT department may be less valuable than it was before the pandemic if it focused solely on traditional areas such as sourcing, implementing and deploying large systems such as SAP.

“Companies must give IT leaders a voice in business matters, especially when it comes to anticipating how technology can be used in pursuit of new business opportunities. [such as] adopting artificial intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior,” Sundaram said. “By encouraging IT leaders to take an active role in the business, most companies will gain technology options that might otherwise be missed. And they will have IT leaders who are deeply connected to and valued by the organization as a whole.”