How to manage your tech profiles' careers

In every company today, tech talent is the lifeblood. With strong career prospects, a sector that never stops evolving, and a low unemployment rate, tech profiles […] are hunted everywhere by everyone.

Everyone is fighting over them — but at what price? In today's economy, attracting, growing, and therefore retaining your best tech profiles is more important than ever.

Faced with these critical challenges, upskilling and building career plans for tech roles is a must inside your company. In this article, our experts explain how to manage your tech profiles' careers to increase retention.

The essentials in three points:

• To attract and retain your tech talent, give them the work environment they're asking for.
• To improve career management for your tech profiles, combine recruiting, training, and upskilling.
• To increase retention of your tech employees, listen to their expectations and communicate about the internal growth opportunities at the company.

What does a tech profile look for in working with you?

Before trying to hire or retain your tech people, it's essential to understand what drives them day to day. In short, you need to understand what they expect.

Without that, no matter what you do to keep them with you, they'll only want one thing: to be understood and valued at their true worth.

Here are 8 points that will help you grant their wish!

Work-life balance

Work-life balance is one of the essential pillars of employee well-being. It's a key way to feel better at work. Goodbye to frustration, dissatisfaction, or stress, which are often tied to a breakdown in this balance.

Balance lets your employee do work that feels meaningful to them and that doesn't encroach on their personal life. It comes through the enjoyment they get from work and lets them use and grow their skills to your company's benefit.

Preserving this balance should therefore be one of the top priorities for your company's HR. You have every interest in caring about it given the upside that follows.

Flexibility in how you work together

Once that balance is in place, flexibility in the format of collaboration is the second lever your company can pull.

Building in this flexibility is even more important since the various Covid-19 crises showed us that working and collaborating remotely through hybrid mode is possible.

So to meet these new expectations, your company, if it can, should let people choose their work location depending on the day. That said, working remotely doesn't just happen — you need to be able to train your employees on these new ways of interacting.

This new way of working requires an investment, and you may not know where to start. Our Bluecoders Academy programs are made for exactly that! Get in touch with us to upskill your recruiters, sales reps, managers, and product teams, starting today!

Growing technically in their craft

Rethinking your company's work environment isn't the only lever you can pull to attract tech talent. You can boost your image's appeal by offering clear technical progression in their craft.

Faced with the shortage in this sector and intense competition, you have every interest in growing your employees, training them better, and supporting them through the transformation of their craft.

From the moment of hiring and during quarterly career check-ins with your HR team, offer a clear progression scale for your tech profiles' skills. This progression includes training days, the chance to attend conferences, and so on.

Being able to keep tabs on their skills

This progression doesn't happen without keeping tabs on their skills. One of the first steps is therefore to take stock of their abilities and aspirations. This step lets you identify future areas for improvement.

When it comes to career management, analyzing the skills your tech people have already developed lets you better target the new opportunities they might want to grow into.

Beyond tracking their progression, this also gives them visibility into their career path and objectives.

Having impact and…

Covid-19 didn't just reshuffle the deck on work flexibility. The successive crises also drastically changed mindsets about the impact employees want to have at their company and in their work.

It's a central motivation when it comes to winning the war for digital talent. It sometimes requires rethinking the missions and objectives of certain tech roles.

…Feeling that their project has impact

Tech profiles also want to be part of a project — to know how they'll contribute to the company and what the company will bring them in terms of impact.

When applying, tech people pay particular attention to CSR, inclusion, and the environmental or social impact of the project they may join.

Taking part in strategic conversations

It's not just about following your tech employees' career growth — it's about including them in the broader strategic evolution of your company.

Your tech team members also expect to be aligned with your company's overall objectives. The correlation between their expectations and your company's needs is just as important as the alignment of their personal and professional objectives.

Many tech talents want to be involved in the company's growth. By offering them training programs to grow their skills, you'll be able to bring them into your company's strategic evolution.

So it's important that they take part in the company's strategic conversations.

Sharing with colleagues

These conversations are even more rewarding when they happen as a team. Fostering integration is therefore key to attracting and retaining your tech profiles. Collaboration platforms can be a valuable help here.

Sharing — both knowledge and skills — is highly sought after among tech people. While repetition is the bane of engineering profiles and automation is the holy grail, we recommend prioritizing exchange within your teams.

How do you track your tech people's career growth?

Understand their craft

You'll have understood by now: to keep your tech talent inside your company, it's important to understand the specifics of their craft and therefore the specifics of tech in general. Since this isn't innate for people who don't work in the sector, it can be useful to follow programs on this — particularly for HR teams.

Tech roles are a combination of creative sense and technique. Without clear answers at the start, you need a talented, flexible team to solve a complex problem.

Sometimes compared to medical diagnosis or research, these roles therefore call for specific recruiting and hiring practices.

Understand the possible careers of your tech employees

Understanding their craft and what they want to do involves understanding the possible careers open to your tech employees.

DevOps, cybersecurity engineers, full-stack developers, data scientists — there are as many tech profiles as there are different tech roles. Each role has its own specifics, so don't overlook the subtleties of the possible career paths for each one.

How do you build a tech career plan?

The stages of tech career management

Career management is about organizing HR for the development of your employees' careers and your company's. It's based on:

• the company's and HR's overall strategy,
• the employee's skills,
• and their career project.

It's both an individual and collective process.

Embedded in talent management, it relies on the strategy of:

• forecasted workforce and skills planning,
• internal mobility,
• training,
• compensation,
• external recruiting.

Career management can be broken down into 7 main stages:

1. Attractiveness for the company
2. Recruiting
3. Onboarding
4. Progression and development
5. Retention
6. Promotion
7. Departure

Each stage is key to the development and well-being of every employee at the company.

Increasing retention and reducing turnover

These two challenges often give your HR team a hard time.

Turnover represents a significant cost for your company. Some studies put the cost of replacing an employee at between half and three times their annual salary. That's an average of 6 to 9 months of salary in offboarding, recruiting, and training costs.

But beyond the financial stakes, the problem of poorly managed turnover can lead to disengagement, absenteeism, and a general drop in morale at your company.

To increase retention of your tech profiles and reduce turnover, you need to counter its main causes, which can include:

• No or few training opportunities at your company
• Poor management quality due to a lack of understanding or knowledge of each role's specifics
• A lack of opportunities for career progression
• An incomplete onboarding process and a lack of diversity
• A lack of recognition and appreciation for their contributions
• An imbalance in their professional life
• Little flexibility in working hours

So it's essential to analyze the sources of turnover at your company, listen to your team, take their expectations into account, offer training paths, and communicate about the possible internal growth opportunities to optimize your investment in people.