These are the skills to recruit for: Lesley Salmon, Kellogg's CIO
It's about collaboration as well as technical knowhow
Layoffs and attrition are the big IT stories in 2023, but investing in staff today will boost retention in the future.
It seems that not a single week can go past now without a tech firm announcing sweeping layoffs. In the past fortnight alone we've seen announcements from IBM, SAP, PagerDuty, Spotify, Google and Microsoft. That's on top of earlier moves at Twilio, Oracle, Arm, Twitter, Meta, Tesla, Salesforce, Amazon, Citrix and Tibco.
It's a bad time to work in Big Tech.
Conversely, it's a great time to be a technologist. If you're between jobs you won't be for long, and if you're in a role already your employer is almost certainly thinking about retention.
That doesn't necessarily mean rising salaries - which some leaders are convinced is an unhealthy bubble - but massive investment in technical skills, wellbeing and personal development.
"Going back 18 months I started to look at this war for talent, especially the war for technology talent, and I thought, 'We've really got to take this seriously,'" says Kellogg's Global CIO Lesley Salmon.
"You know what the environment's been like: people are leaving for silly things, double salary and - I'm exaggerating - moving to a VP role when maybe they were a junior role in our organisation.
"I'm not going to beg people to stay. Our approach was 'Let's do the right thing for people before they pick up the phone to the recruiter, or before they have the conversation, wherever possible, and see if we can stop that from happening.'"
Kellogg's approach to doing "the right thing" is a programme called Year of Development Always, or Yoda (which is certainly snappier and also has the possibility of lightsabres).
Yoda means taking an individual approach to each employee. Ask what it is that motivates that person: is it flexibility, salary, personal development? Do they dream of being CIO? Once you understand that, you understand how to keep them.
"There's no shortcut," says Lesley, who urges her peers to "do the holistic work as well."
Holistic work helps the senior team understand the skills they have in Kellogg's today and think about what they'll need for the future - and that is vital to stay competitive.
These are the skills to recruit for: Lesley Salmon, Kellogg's CIO
It's about collaboration as well as technical knowhow
Layoffs and attrition are the big IT stories in 2023, but investing in staff today will boost retention in the future.
The skills you'll need
"The skills that we need today aren't necessarily the skills that we need for the future," says Lesley. "Our Yoda programme enables us to look at, what we need to deliver today and what will we need in the future and create...development curriculums around that."
Kellogg's aim is to build "a culture of learning," where employees are keen to advance not just to add another skill to their portfolio, but because it will help them move towards their own end goal. Instead of "I want to go on this training course," the language used now is, "I'd like an experience that supports me doing X."
Even with that understanding, finding an answer to "What skills will be important in the future?" isn't easy - Lesley calls it "the million-dollar question." However, she stresses that she doesn't focus solely on technical prowess.
"First and foremost, I recruit for culture and attitude. I think if you've got a good cultural fit - and I don't mean everybody looks and feels the same, because then you get no diversity - but a can-do attitude...very aligned with our Kellogg values around giving back to society, as well as working hard, I'm going to go there first of all. That's where I'm going to recruit."
Technical skills can be taught. Success is "more about attitude, can-do, wanting to be part of one team, wanting to make a difference, wanting to drive value."
What might surprise other IT leaders is the value Lesley places on people from a non-IT background. "If anybody's got a couple of years of non-IT functional experience, I'm recruiting for that as well... That's hugely, hugely valuable. Some of our most successful IT colleagues are ones that have come into our IT function with a great business grounding, and then they learn IT along the way."
But those people don't just get an easy pass into the industry - they still need to "do the hard yards" once they get there to learn those technical skills
"I think nothing replaces being in the trenches, going through really hard go-lives, working on development, working on specs, getting through testing, knowing what it's like to do 24/7 war rooms successfully, or whatever terminology you use. Nothing replaces that."
When it comes to 'hard' skills, data and analytics are what Lesley emphasises, believing they will be "a huge part of every element of business in the future." The people she recruits don't need to be AI experts, but understanding and appreciating data and analytics will be crucial for future success.
"We'll need both kinds [of employee]. I think we've got to accept that some really hardcore technical people want to be back office; I'm alright with that. We need people with front office skills as well, and interaction and collaboration skills. But there's also a place at our table for the real hardcore techies that don't particularly want to speak and liaise with users. I'm okay with that, too."
These are the skills to recruit for: Lesley Salmon, Kellogg's CIO
It's about collaboration as well as technical knowhow
Layoffs and attrition are the big IT stories in 2023, but investing in staff today will boost retention in the future.
The once and future CIO
The intersection between collaboration, communication and hardcore tech is where the leader of the technology function has always had to sit, which has only become more important as tech spreads through a company. The CIO (or CDO, CTO, IT director, etc) is a person who can both work with non-technical people to explain complex concepts, and is equally at home in development, testing and go-lives.
It all stems from modern business, where the majority of employees rely on technology to perform.
"Collaboration is absolutely critical," says Lesley, "because technology is ubiquitous." The secret is having a relationship with colleagues strong enough that they feel empowered and able to talk to the IT function about new technologies, rather than trying to implement new systems without your knowledge.
"We need to be business-facing collaborative leaders. We also have to know how to run projects, because people are going to be looking at us to know how to implement projects in the future, especially the bigger strategic initiatives."
Finally, the modern CIO needs have "a good sense of which of the new technologies to back." It's impossible to support everything, so the head of IT must have the knowledge and confidence to make a call on what will deliver the most value.
"Is it a technology looking for a business problem that maybe doesn't even exist? Or is it technology that you think 'Yeah, this is really going to go somewhere'? You don't always get that right."
In Lesley's case, she is looking at both blockchain and metaverse technologies for the future of the CPG industry. The former hasn't really got traction even after "five or six years of trying," but she describes metaverse as "Ignore at your peril."
These are the skills to recruit for: Lesley Salmon, Kellogg's CIO
It's about collaboration as well as technical knowhow
Layoffs and attrition are the big IT stories in 2023, but investing in staff today will boost retention in the future.
Calming attrition
What does all of this mean for Kellogg's tech sector? And why have we been talking about skills in an article that started out lamenting the industry's high attrition rate?
It's because the two are intrinsically linked. Investing in people, developmentally as well as financially, will not eliminate attrition: people will always leave as their circumstances change. But it is possible to manage and mitigate that attrition, keeping it to a level the company can handle through retraining and recruitment.
"We've done a really good job of maintaining [attrition rates]," says Lesley - Kellogg's attrition notably ticked up by less than one percentage point last year. "I think it's a lot to do with our culture and the investment that we've got in people. People must be our competitive advantage; people matter the most. We're investing in our people from a development standpoint, we've got every flexibility that you could possibly imagine, and I think it's working."