As the world prepares to emerge from pandemic stasis, companies are contending with what many are calling “The Great Resignation,” as huge swaths of the workforce rethink their lives and livelihoods, moving away from cities, pursuing new job opportunities, and in many cases, changing careers altogether.
In April, the U.S. Labor Department reported that nearly 4 million people quit their jobs, with most exits happening in the retail, professional and business services, and warehousing sectors. A Microsoft survey of more than 30,000 respondents found that 41% of workers planned to quit or change professions this year, while the number of remote job postings on LinkedIn spiked by 5X during the course of the pandemic. A similar trend was uncovered by a Robert Half International survey of 3,800 workers, where nearly a third (32%) said they plan to look for a new role in the next few months, mostly driven by the desire for a salary boost or greater opportunity for career advancement.
Even once-coveted Big Tech positions are under fire with reports indicating workers are leaving for smaller companies where they can have greater control and more options. While IT organizations are seeing less turnover related to wholesale career changes, there is an escalating war for talent, mounting pressure on CIOs to explore new tactics from rethinking the work environment to getting creative with compensation and cultivating new pipelines.
Compared to other functional areas, IT departments are generally better situated to embrace hybrid models and flexible work arrangements as contract workers and “follow the sun” 24/7 development teams have been a staple of IT operating models for some time. “Most senior-level executives in a company are used to having everyone under one roof or in the same country or time zones, but CIOs have been managing a globally dispersed and distributed workforce forever,” says Charles “Chuck” Gray, a partner and head of U.S. Technology Officers Practice and board practice specialist at Egon Zehnder, a hiring and recruiting firm. “CIOs should see this as an opportunity to create as flexible a work environment as possible.”
Full story: Beth Stackpole: IT navigates the ‘Great Resignation,’ on CIO.com (23 August 2021).
