Coaching to Aid IT Careers, Retention

Computerworld - Most companies know that helping information technology employees grow professionally through training and development can be a key retention method. But understanding this process is another matter. How do busy managers make time to give employees the training, mentoring and career direction they need?
For Allmerica Financial Corp. in Worcester, Mass., the solution was to hire 20 coaches to help manage the company's 850-person IT staff.
"In a traditional management role, managers focus on delivery and people," says Maryellen Doherty, who has been head coach of project management for 16 months at Allmerica. "When a manager focuses on both, delivery is on the forefront, and the development of people's skills and needs become secondary," explains Doherty.
Coaching is hardly a new phenomenon, says Michael Boyd, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. For years, companies have employed coaches to help senior executives develop their management skills.
What's new, however, is that the practice is becoming more personalized at lower levels of the organization, says Boyd. Now companies realize that "all critical employees need the same level of enabling advice and counsel," he says.
Fewer than one in five IT workers say they're actively being coached right now, but 42% say they've been coached at some point during their careers, says David Foote, managing partner at Foote Partners LLC, a New Canaan, Conn.-based consultancy that specializes in IT workforce issues. Those figures are based on a Foote Partners survey of 8,500 IT workers at 680 companies.
Allmerica introduced coaches 18 months ago as part of a broader change management initiative. That involved transforming Allmerica from a functional organization to a process-driven company, as described in Mike Hammer's Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-Centered Organization is Changing Our Work and Our Lives (HarperCollins, 1997).
Centers of Excellence
Part of this transformation included centralizing IT and creating Centers of Excellence (COE), or virtual organizations that consist of a talent pool. Led by a head coach, each COE offers a resource for IT workers seeking training, professional development and networking opportunities. "Centers of Excellence help build a professional identity," says Doherty.
IT employees at Allmerica belong to one of four COEs: software engineering, business services, project management or desktop operations and systems management.
Doherty says she has two goals as a coach: to assign skilled project-management staff to the business units and to provide ongoing professional development to the 40 employees she coaches.
Attending key planning meetings, Doherty works with managers as they identify their staffing needs, and she also fills vacancies.
Doherty