Time to Grow Your IT Workforce

 

Is It Time to Grow Your IT Workforce?

If your biotechnology company is growing, you’re likely taking a fresh look at your current IT workforce. While creating jobs is a boost to the local and national economy, it’s not a decision employers like to make on a whim.  How do you know if it’s time to increase your IT workforce?  Let us take a look.

Long-Term Planning

The best way to anticipate your workforce needs is to plan ahead.  Being proactive in your IT workforce needs, rather than being reactive, is the key to avoiding getting into panic mode.  Your HR department is in an ideal position to monitor IT hiring cycles and to partner with your senior management to develop an IT workforce plan.

Be sure that your plan includes:

  • Forecast your company’s growth.
  • Develop plan for current IT employees who may move into leadership roles.
  • Retention plan to keep your current IT workforce
  • Assess necessary skills and experience in both current positions and anticipated positions of your IT workforce.
  • Option for meeting workforce needs internally and by recruiting additional full-time or temporary employees.
  • Feedback from Employees
  • The state of your employees is a good indicator of the health of your business. If managers and human resources are overloaded with complaints of a too heavy workload, it’s time to examine the issue.
  • Sooner or later employee issues become customer issues and affect the bottom line. Here’s how to validate employee feedback:
  • Task managers with a review of the workloads of their subordinates.
  • Determine if projects are falling behind or through the cracks.
  • Evaluate job duties and processes for sticking points.

If your employees are often overworked, burnout won’t be too far behind.  This is an indicator that it’s time to add to your IT workforce.  Despite the severity of potential IT skill gaps, 61 percent of organizations do not have skills forecasts for IT, while up to 80 percent do not provide training or coaching for skills that they expect to increase in importance.   The demand for skilled employees will significantly outpace supply in three emerging IT roles that are particularly important: cyber risk analyst, service manager and data scientist.

New Skill Sets Needed

As your company grows, demands on your current IT workforce increases, and also an increase need for different IT skill sets.
Look within your own company first. Knowing the capabilities of your current IT workforce is the best place to begin.  A current employee’s skill set could be mismatched with their current position and they would better serve the company in a new position.
Determine what tasks lies ahead and hire for it.  Recruit based not only on what the company needs today, but what it will likely need in the next couple years.  This is where forecasting for your company’s IT talent needs comes in handy.

Let’s Plan Your IT Workforce Together

Your company can rely on our IT staffing experts to assist you in planning for your workforce needs now and in the future.  Let us save you time and stress in finding qualified employees.  Contact us today to see how we can help you and your company.