It been called the Great Tech Reset – the wave of layoffs at tech companies that occurred earlier this year. It was notable because layoffs occurred at too-big-to-fail organizations (including Google, Intel, Microsoft, and SAP) and affected previously highly protected technical staff. The layoffs could be attributed to a combination of several factors. Interest rate hikes over the past two years have impacted investments and hiring by technology companies. This year’s recession forecasts also contributed to dampening growth. Meanwhile, the emergence of AI systems caused many organizations to cancel projects that were already in the pipeline and pivot to adding AI capabilities to their products.
Public Sector Still Hiring IT Talent
Yet despite the doom and gloom reporting about massive IT layoffs, as we head towards the end of Q4, we can see there is still a significant need for technical talent. This is especially true for the public sector, which is already facing a deficit of 78,000 jobs, and even more so for cybersecurity roles, as cyber threats continue to escalate. To quote one cybersecurity firm owner on Fox Business, “While Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Google, and the other tech giants are going through layoffs, our industry has hung out an enormous Help Wanted sign.”
Staff Burnout and Departures
Unfortunately, even layoffs at large tech companies don’t seem to help sway tech workers into considering government positions. That may be because government agencies face considerable challenges. An aging government workforce is expected to lead to a wave of IT staff retirements soon. Remaining employees will have to shoulder heavier workloads. Given budget constraints and typically long government procurement cycles for new IT, much of that work will be maintaining legacy technologies; ones that don’t interest younger employees or add value to their resumes.
There are some generational issues at play as well. Younger workers, many of whom aspired to positions at FAANG companies, have different expectations than prior generations, like the ability to work from home and other work/life balance issues. The private sector is better able to compete for these workers – as well as offer them higher salaries.
How Can Local Governments Find IT Staff?
With a shortage of IT workers in the tens of thousands, how can government agencies cope?
Project Triage: IT leadership will need to identify and focus on the most important priorities. City managers are going to have to make some tough decisions on projects that are critical and those that will need to be postponed…or killed entirely. This post offers some hard to hear, but necessary advice: “The natural inclination is to push [dying projects] to the background and let them slowly die on their own. Unfortunately, they still consume capacity and attention from your staff. Effective project triage means identifying dying projects as early as possible and killing them off before they consume too much time and energy.”
Upskill existing talent: Chances you have a few current employees with extensive knowledge of your processes, functions, and technology that would enable them to move into technical roles, given enough support and training. This GovTech article has some good suggestions for agencies trying to hire internally for IT roles, especially for cybersecurity.
Explore outsourcing: If you don’t have internal resources for technical positions, consider moving select responsibilities to a managed services provider. This is a cost-effective and fast way to free up staff to work on your most important projects and can improve employee retention by enabling employees to work on new projects instead of maintaining existing infrastructure. Another upside is that outsourcing avoids the dilemma of new employee churn and replaces it with a technology partner able and committed to delivering the services your agency needs.
You don’t have to recruit and onboard for IT infrastructure and other IT roles – let our team handle it instead. Talk to us to discover how we can help with managed services, cybersecurity, and virtual CIO support.
