The Best Tech Employees Want to Learn and Do More
If you want to make a solid investment in your technical staff’s sustained success, facilitating and promoting tech employees’ professional growth provides one of the best ways to do so. Employee growth is a solid investment because providing your workforce with opportunities to learn and do more will help you attract and retain top talent, thus reducing turnover and the expenses and headaches of recruiting, hiring, and training new employees.
Stagnation and boredom are insidious enemies for individuals like tech workers. People who thrive on new challenges and are intellectually curious can quickly lose their enthusiasm for a job that does not provide them with enough stimulation and opportunities for professional growth.
Tech workers in Phoenix, Dallas, and nationwide who arrive in the morning knowing they may face something new and different, have a novel problem to solve, or engage in tasks that expand their skill set will look forward to coming into the office every day.
Similarly, companies that provide tech employees with policies, programs, and opportunities focused on their ongoing professional growth will feel a sense of loyalty and gratitude to an employer clearly invested in their employees’ success.
Here are four ways that companies can support the professional growth of tech employees:
Share Knowledge
Organize monthly lunch meetings or seminars where engineers and tech staff can learn a new skill or enhance their existing skillset. Allow your employees to suggest topics that they find the most relevant and interesting. Such seminars can focus on hard skills related to their job responsibilities or help them build their “soft skills,” such as communication or emotional intelligence. Monthly meetings can give tech workers a fantastic opportunity to expand their horizons and empower them with knowledge to help them throughout their careers.
Encourage Attendance At Industry Conferences and Events
When your tech employees attend events or conferences related to your business or their role, the knowledge and contacts they acquire benefit your company and the attendee alike. Not only will your technical staff gain valuable knowledge from presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions, but they will also learn from their fellow attendees. For employers, attendance at these confabs also increases your company’s profile and visibility—a true win-win.
Mentorship, Coaching, and Development Programs
Most tech employment managers understand that mentorship and coaching are highly effective ways of integrating newer workers into the workforce, showing them the ropes, and expanding their skill sets. But too many companies do so on an ad-hoc basis or forget about mentorship and coaching after an employee’s first few weeks on the job.
Institutionalize and formalize a mentorship and coaching program to give employees the benefits that come from such relationships. Develop and implement a personalized development plan for each tech employee. Assign a senior member of your team to work with the employee to craft their individual plan, focusing on the areas and skills they would like to work on.
Set goals and milestones for the plan and encourage each mentor and mentee pair to meet regularly to discuss progress and how things are going generally. Build a relationship that makes the employee feel comfortable asking questions or expressing their opinions or concerns without fear of negative consequences.
Cross-Training to Promote The Professional Growth of Tech Employees
The tech industry requires agility as well as the ability to understand the big picture. As good as a tech employee may be at their particular job, they may not fully grasp how their work impacts other departments or the company as a whole. Conversely, they may have no idea about how different parts of the company affect their responsibilities.
Cross-departmental training programs are a great way to educate and inform tech employees about other aspects of your business while also facilitating better communication between different parts of your organization.
Remote Work Collaboration Training
The pandemic will end, but remote work for a large portion of the tech workforce will remain. The skills needed and tools used to ensure seamless collaboration between people who may be hundreds or thousands of miles apart are different than those used by co-workers who can simply walk down a hallway.
Invest in training that can help remote colleagues share ideas, communicate, and master the technology that can bring them together. Plenty of remote collaboration courses are available online, and YouTube also has a vast variety of instructive videos on the subject.
GTN Technical Staffing: Connecting the Right Tech Talent With The Right Tech Companies
The professional growth of tech employees is a value-added proposition for employers and employees alike. Employee growth makes for a better talent pool and helps companies attract and retain the highest-caliber employees. GTN Technical Staffing in Phoenix, Dallas, and nationwide connects the best tech workers to the best tech companies.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you navigate an ever-changing tech employment landscape.
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