Skills shortages are at an all-time high, with 67% of digital leaders struggling to get hold of the right talent, especially in key areas such as Big Data, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
With talent tough to find and IT budgets constrained, a focus on development and mentorship programmes could be the smartest way for CIOs to fill their digital skills gaps. Three tech leaders share their best-practice tips for honing internal talent.
Danny Attias, chief digital and information officer at British charity Anthony Nolan, says mentorship and development is hugely important to his organisation. The charity runs apprenticeships to help talented staff flourish.
"Starting with people who have an appetite for growth, and who are ambitious, makes mentoring a lot easier – they want to succeed," he says. "We start with that as a baseline, and then it's about giving them the tools and the training they need, and providing them with every possible opportunity."
Attias says the aim of the charity's mentorship and development programmes is to help talented people get even better. He gives the example of someone who started in an entry-level IT job with the charity eight years ago and was recently promoted to director of product.
"There's been some big steps on the way," he says. "I've secured her external mentorship from a digital design agency, so that she can learn, and the deal is that she learns from the outside and then she teaches me about digital."
Attias says the charity is always looking for new ways to inspire its talent. For example three developers at the organisation, who recently completed 18-month software engineering apprenticeships, and are now running key IT and data projects at the charity.
Education is also baked into the charity's day-to-day engineering work. Each two-week sprint at Anthony Nolan includes half a day of personal development, which Attias says adds up to a significant amount of time on an annual basis.
The tech team self-organises this development process – they decide who learns what, how knowledge is imparted and exchanged, and how this learning process contributes to continuous personal growth.
"So we're all teaching each other all the time and we're all learning. None of us pretends to be experts in what we do or that we've ever reached a limit," says Attias.
Joe Soule, CTO at Capital One Europe, says he feels lucky that people have taken the time and effort to mentor him at particular points during his career. He currently mentors people in his own organisation and unlike coaching, which he feels is more generalised, Soule says effective mentorship centres on career development.
"There is always the great debate between coaching and mentoring. If it's mentoring, then it's likely that I've personally been through the problem, and have an idea of how to solve it, and I'm prepared to share with others how I went about solving that issue – and then they can choose to take that into how they plan to go through their career," he says.
