Maintaining separate career ladders for technology and management professionals provides a number of benefits, key among which is helping organizations recruit and maintain the best IT talent.
The Conference Board’s survey of global CEOs highlighted “Failure to attract and retain top talent” as organization’s number-one obstacle. Many organizations feel the pain. Some have started taking useful steps.
The traditional model for an IT career path is one charted something like this: Work in a technical support or generic junior programmer role. Work to advance to a developer or engineer role. Make the final step to architect, arrive at the technical dead-end, and then move into management in order to move up.
But the success factors for management are rather different than those for technical contributors, and conflating their paths is fraught. (We can skip for now the conversation about how an architect is not simply a more experienced developer/engineer– an equally widespread mistake but a separate subject.)
The result of this misaligned career funnel is that smaller or less-optimized organizations end up with unnecessarily technical management and restless and frustrated senior technical teams. A colleague in the tech community who is an IT Director related to me the concerns he had about a set of shell scripts he authored and is known to help rack and plug in servers in the data center. There is no harm in leadership being able to code, pitching in, and knowing where things are plugged in, but there is something wrong if this sort of thing is commonplace. To wit, management with widespread login authorization is a worrisome sign.
To counter the broken historical model, organizations have recognized the need to fix the career funnel. In reality, many of the finest IT managers can’t write a lick of code. That’s a feature, not a bug. Managing people and software engineering, for example, are are skill sets that simply don’t overlap much. If you hire good technical teams, Managers and Directors can look to those team for technical answers instead digging into the details, which wastes critical management bandwidth. Technical people need their management to be management.
So how are organizations fixing this? Both Oracle and FedEx have an HR “grade” which contains both some managers and some senior technical staff, under the modifier “principal”. This prevents the “Technical Principal” or “Principal Architect” from thinking that becoming a manager is the appropriate or necessary next step on the career ladder. Or just being annoyed and chasing pay elsewhere. Or chasing startup adrenaline. Or…
As a step beyond, the FedEx “Technical Fellow” position is more senior than starting managers. Next? Fellows can advance to a “Technical Director” position, and report to the CIO.
At this level, the Technical Directors and Managing Directors can look to each other as peers (and HR-grade equals). Obviously, there are not a lot of these positions, even in the largest organizations, but a path to positions that report to C-level executives is a successful career path strategy for some top companies who have embraced it.
Employees care about career advancement. The danger is that they care enough about it to follow the awkward paths they are forced into. Organizations who do not adapt to this reality will always fail to attract and retain top talent.
Some additional thoughts elsewhere… www.mckinsey.com/business-…