Attracting and retaining technical talent in Australia and New Zealand is increasingly challenging. The Hays Salary Guide for 2022 shows that as many as 91% of employers are dealing with a skills shortage. This hinders growth and operations for 83% of organizations – the highest level in the 43 years that the Guide has been produced.
During the pandemic, many skilled workers returned to their home countries with visas – many had no choice. Even as the borders reopened, strict immigration rules made attracting tech talent from abroad difficult. As a result, A/NZ currently relies on a very small pool of technical skills.
The situation has led to a two-way brain drain: while foreign talent has returned home, local talent is still being lured away with highly attractive packages that are difficult to compete with. While COVID has made it easier than ever to work remotely, many A/NZ businesses, especially in the financial services industry, require employees to live in the country due to data sovereignty issues.
One problem with a workforce constantly moving to the next big step is the intellectual gap left after they leave. They bring extensive institutional knowledge, and companies have smaller teams with less ability to do the same amount of work.
Technology teams face huge challenges attracting and retaining the talent they need to make, scale, run their applications, and maintain to the high required standards. The excessive rotation of employees moving between different organizations impacts technology teams and business leaders. Business leaders need the best talent to build great products and stay competitive.
Provide flexibility
People want to be able to choose whether they work remotely or come to the office, and organizations that force staff to be physically present in a workplace can probably count on greater brain drain. According to Accenture, 63% of high-growth companies have adopted a “productivity everywhere” work model, and 83% of employees prefer it. Gone are the days when ping pong tables or draft beer were a top priority, as they favor the flexibility that hybrid work offers.
Fairness promotes growth.
While companies with deep pockets can offer attractive salary packages, top talent won’t stick around if the work isn’t meaningful or the staff is overworked. Diversity, fairness, and inclusiveness are critical today. According to Payscale’s 2022 Gender Pay Gap Report, women earned just $0.82 for every dollar earned by a male counterpart. Women of all races and ethnicities and men of color make less than white men. To attract and retain top talent, organizations must ensure equal pay based on race and gender.
Investing in people is investing in growth and competitiveness. Providing career development and upskilling opportunities is critical and benefits employees and their organizations. Learning and development are also essential for retaining talent. In the report From Great Resignation to Great Reimagination, Deloitte notes that organizations can “focus on satisfying restless workers” by offering new learning or rotational positions.
Providing the right tools
Developers and engineers want to do meaningful work, not menial tasks. Constantly dealing with alert fatigue and fire drills is not what they signed up for. They want to write code and build great products that make customers happy. When engineers do meaningful and interesting work and are allowed to grow through learning and being challenged appropriately, they are more likely to stay. Spending time on low-value, repetitive tasks that could be automated wastes resources, especially when skills are scarce. Valuable technical personnel must work on high-value projects to drive growth. Organizations must invest in tools and automation to make work environments for developers and engineers as smooth as possible.
These approaches and cultural changes must come from the top with the full support of the wider business community. For many organizations, it is a major adjustment. Companies that once saw IT as the “help desk” must now recognize it as one of the most business-critical departments for driving innovation and growth. An evolving corporate culture to attract and retain skilled developers and engineers is vital to the development of competitivenesstive.
