Mentoring In IT



This article is also available as a "The Sniffer Guy" podcast on iTunes.

ATTENTION AMERICAN IT MANAGERS: Within the next decade most of your best people will retire or die. Your senior staffers are baby boomers with twenty years or more of experience in their field. They built the systems: they learned the operating systems as they were created: they know what they know from real life experience that cannot be learned in school. They are also somewhere between their late forties and early sixties. They rose to the top while competing within the largest workforce America has ever seen. When they leave they will take a level of efficiency and expertise with them that will take twenties years to replace.

To make matters worse, the population of appropriately educated Americans coming up behind them is far smaller than the population getting ready to move out. Do the math. Start now. To try to buy that talent later will not only cost you a fortune but you will be competing for a very small population of such individuals, with the entire world.

In this corporate environment where everyone is disposable and so much work is done by contractors so that companies can avoid having to make a commitment to personnel, it is far too easy to miss this growing danger. Business Managers may have learned this