There is no room for fire and hire in modern IT, says Worldline CTO

When adopting new ways of working, existing staff have a lot to offer

Reskilling a department by getting rid of old staff and bringing in new ones is a common practice. It's especially widespread in IT, with its enthusiasm for new technologies, and was most recently seen at Lloyds Banking Group. It doesn't have to be that way though, argues Ryan Bryers, CTO of e-payments business Worldline.

"I would always look to try to retrain," he told us. "It's about quality over quantity for me. I would prefer to have a more capable, smaller group of people who can work faster."

Bryers practices what he preaches; Worldline is working with its staff to instill new skills in those who have grown up with older frameworks like .NET.

"We have been looking to cross-train people. We've done a heavy push into the Lightbend stack; we're heavily focussed on Scala at the moment. We're trying to move people more into that functional programming for any new products or solutions where we can do it as a very microservices approach.

"I've built an elite group in India - they've predominantly come from a Java background, but they're teaching people who've got .NET skills to translate across to Scala… We're taking anyone from any walk of life and guiding them across, because they've got a desire to want to do it. I think that a lot of people can be retrained; it comes down to whether you want to do the retraining."

Companies need to be motivated to put the time and effort in to implement retraining, but so do employees. That can be difficult, though:

"We've all heard the Digital Native story, but there's a midpoint: the Digital Ignorant, who just resists. That's natural for us, as human beings; even the most digital of us. I resisted Facebook for almost 10 years. We all naturally resist stuff until we see its benefit…

"A lot of people resist the transformation because they feel that their role's under threat. I've been around saying, ‘No, your role's not under threat. What's possibly under threat is the way that you've been doing your role.' If you adapt a little bit then you're still in the game."

Developers are quite easy to convince of the need to change, but the people around them are more difficult.

"How do you change a command and control project manager to say, ‘Throw all that away, you don't need it any more'? You can actually see the meltdown within the PM. Prince2, ITIL, TOGAF - they're brilliant for waterfall, and most project managers are still in that Prince2 ethos; but what's the role of an agile project manager? It's totally different; still command and control, but in a different way. That project manager has to realise that his role is now more about integrating with the project owner and SCRUM master."

Bryers is handling resistance by placing experts with IT teams and having them teach while on the job:

"At the moment we're bringing together a group of coaches… I call it incubation. Drop an expert in and say, ‘This expert's going to work with you for four or six weeks, and going to get you to the point where you really get it'.

"In anything I've ever done...it's been a case of learn by doing things. That's why I like the idea of incubation. Drop an expert in, diffuse their knowledge through the team… That's the approach we've taken. Resistance, yes - you're going to get that anywhere; you just have to be aware of it and manage it."

Not every legacy-skilled staff member wants to or can be retrained - and we'll cover how to handle them in an upcoming article.