How to keep great people growing and contributing over the long term.
Retaining great people is just as important as hiring them. This guide explores practical ways to support career growth, strengthen engagement, develop future leaders, and create a workplace where IT professionals can thrive and contribute over the long term.
Career development in IT is one of the most commonly cited retention factors, and one of the most commonly mishandled. The organisations that get it right treat it as a structured, ongoing conversation, not a once-a-year performance review exercise.
The most common failure in IT career development is treating it as synonymous with promotion. Many organisations have clear pathways for people who want to move into management, and almost nothing for those who want to grow as technical specialists. This creates a structural problem: your best technical people either move into management, where they may be less effective and less fulfilled, or they leave for organisations that recognise and reward technical excellence.
Two consistent patterns emerge from the organisations that retain IT talent effectively:
At the start of each year (or at relevant intervals), a structured conversation that doesn’t start with ‘what do you want to be doing in five years?’ but with more focused options:
Once the individual’s goal direction is understood, the conversation should produce a concrete plan: what skills need to be developed, what experiences would accelerate the goal, and what support the organisation will provide to make it possible.
For organisations that want to retain strong technical specialists, a defined technical career pathway is essential. This creates a recognised route for people who want to grow their expertise without managing others:
| Level | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Junior / Graduate | Learning core skills in the specialisation. Working under close supervision. Building foundational knowledge. |
| Mid-level | Working with increasing independence. Contributing to design decisions. Beginning to mentor more junior team members. |
| Senior | Leading technical work within a project or domain. Recognised expertise. Beginning to influence technical direction. |
| Principal / Lead | Defining technical approach across multiple projects or domains. Significant influence on technology strategy. Peer to senior management on technical matters. |
| Distinguished / Fellow | Organisation-wide technical authority. External recognition in the field. Sets technical direction for the organisation. |
IT professionals are more attuned than most employees to the quality of the tools and systems they work with. The right tools don’t just improve productivity. They signal that the organisation takes its technical work seriously.
Many organisations invest in tools but underinvest in the education and enablement needed to use them well. This creates a situation where teams have access to powerful technology that delivers a fraction of its potential value because people don’t know how to use it effectively. Every new tool release, every feature update, every platform change needs accompanying investment in education, not just access.
It’s really easy to give people tools to try and make them more productive. But if you haven’t kept up with the education around how those tools work, if they get updates and nobody’s learned what’s changed, you’re failing your team. Throwing ten tools at someone or throwing two doesn’t matter if you’re not using them properly. Sian Clements, Younity
For many IT professionals, particularly developers and engineers, their tools are not just productivity instruments. They are part of their professional identity. Being forced to work with outdated, poorly maintained, or restricted technology is a genuine retention risk for technically strong people who know what good looks like. When evaluating your technology environment from a retention perspective, ask:
Team culture in a hybrid environment does not maintain itself. It requires deliberate attention and active investment from both leaders and team members.
Building and maintaining a strong team culture in a hybrid environment involves three things that don’t happen automatically:
The informal connection that happens naturally when people work in the same space needs to be designed for in a hybrid environment. Regular team rituals, not all work-focused, maintain the social fabric. A monthly team lunch, a quarterly offsite, a weekly informal check-in that’s not about the work. These need to be protected on the calendar, not cancelled when things get busy.
In hybrid meetings, people in the physical room often have an advantage over those joining remotely. This creates a two-tier dynamic where remote participants are less engaged and less visible. Solutions: either everyone joins remotely (hybrid call policy), or meetings are designed specifically for in-person, with remote participation handled differently.
Leaders who are rarely visible to the full team, either because they’re always in the office while the team is remote, or vice versa, lose connection with their teams quickly. Deliberate visibility across both contexts, including being occasionally remote when the team is remote and in-person when they are, signals equity.
What are practical ways to build team culture when people are working in different places? You have to create the rituals deliberately. And when things get busy, those rituals are the first thing that gets cancelled. That’s exactly when you shouldn’t cancel them. Culture is built in those moments. Amanda, Younity
Feedback is one of the most powerful tools available to managers, and one of the most underused. IT professionals in particular benefit from feedback that is specific, honest, and constructive, and many don’t receive nearly enough of it.
Effective performance feedback has several consistent characteristics:
| Quality | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Specific | Not ‘your communication could be better’ but ‘in the sprint review last Thursday, the way you explained the API changes left the product team unclear about what was changing and why. Here’s what I’d suggest instead.’ |
| Timely | Feedback given at the time, or soon after an event, is significantly more useful than feedback delivered months later in an annual review. |
| Balanced | Highlighting what’s working well is not just nice. It tells people what to do more of, which is as valuable as telling them what to do differently. |
| Two-way | The best performance conversations involve genuine dialogue. What does the employee think? What do they need? The manager’s observation is an input to the conversation, not the final word. |
| Focused on growth | Feedback framed around development (‘here’s what would make you more effective’) is received differently from feedback framed as criticism (‘here’s what’s wrong with what you did’). |
IT teams contain people with widely different communication preferences. Some developers and engineers, particularly those who are more introverted or neurodivergent, can find direct feedback conversations confrontational, even when the content is fair and reasonable. This doesn’t mean softening the feedback. It means being thoughtful about the format:
I think it comes back to honesty without being harsh. People don’t have the opportunity to improve if they don’t know what’s wrong. And with developers, who can be quite introverted, you’ve got to find a way to communicate that’s not too confronting. Tailor it to the EQ of the person. Amanda, Younity
Retaining strong IT talent is not just a people management priority. It is a financial and operational one. Understanding the true cost of turnover helps organisations make the case for investment in retention.
When a strong IT professional leaves, the visible cost is the recruitment fee. The total cost is significantly higher:
| Cost Component | What it includes |
|---|---|
| Recruitment cost | Agency fees (typically 15 to 20% of first-year salary for specialist roles), job advertising, internal recruiter time. |
| Productivity gap | The period of reduced output while the role is vacant. For technical roles that are critical dependencies, this can create project delays with significant business impact. |
| Onboarding cost | Time and resources invested in getting the replacement up to speed. For senior technical roles, this is typically three to six months before the person is fully effective. |
| Knowledge loss | The institutional knowledge, relationships, and context that leaves with the person. This is rarely fully captured in documentation and takes time to rebuild. |
| Team impact | Departures affect team morale and can trigger further departures, particularly if the person leaving is respected and their reasons for leaving resonate with others. |
| Management time | The time leaders spend managing a vacancy, a hiring process, and an onboarding process instead of doing their actual work. |
An important nuance: retaining people is most valuable when those people are growing, engaged, and delivering value. Retaining people who have stopped learning and are coasting out of comfort, or who have become disengaged but remain because change feels like too much effort, does not serve the organisation’s interests. The goal is an environment where strong, engaged people want to stay because it’s the right place for them, not one where people stay because they’re too comfortable to leave.
Retaining people just to keep your churn levels down, because that person is comfortable and knows what they’re doing, that’s not the right reason to hang on to people. If you can see your people continuing to be better and continuing to bring their best, there’s every reason to hang on to them. But the goal is people who want to stay because they’re growing, not people who stay because leaving seems like too much effort. Sian Clements, Younity
The most reliable retention levers for IT professionals, in rough order of impact: