Tools, toys & training: meet the needs of your IT staff now by offering them the three T's and you may gain productivity, innovation and loyalty

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Oct, 2001 by Nicole Rivard

Caruso's advice is, if you want the best and the brightest, treat them like that. She has streamlined the recruitment process so she can hire people in two weeks.

"If you post a job January 20 and candidates don't get a call until March 10 you've already lost them," she says. "But that's all too common in higher ed. Despite universities saying we pay too low you don't lose them on salary, you lose them because we don't treat them as though they are so special that we want them.

"The minute you're done interviewing, make an offer. If you need salary approval, do that ahead of time. There's nothing worse than waiting to hear about a job, and the first offer is hard to resist, even if it's not your first choice."

Raising Retention Rates

While it may seem difficult to take a twenty something who was working for a dot.com making $100,000 a year and offer him or her an entry-level position, there are non financial rewards you can give IT staff to keep them engaged, involved and motivated. The areas that need the most attention because they have the highest turnover are networking, e-commerce and Web authoring and design.

Professional development is one area higher ed leaders have been working on.

"That's clearly something we can offer people is opportunities to grow," says Ingerman. "After all we're higher education. We need to be encouraging learning." He began offering professional development days, allowing staff to take time, whatever was necessary, to focus on their own personal development.

"What that could mean is getting caught up on e-mail, reading a magazine, surfing the Web, figuring out a piece of software, just something where they are doing something that will better their skill set to meet the needs we have," he says.

Neil Evans, executive director of NW Center for Emerging Technologies at Bellevue Community College, says providing IT staff members with technical training opportunities and letting them work on the newest technologies are great retention strategies.

Higher education can also do a better job at mimicking private industry where they offer stock options, says Evans. What he means is psychological ownership, where IT staff members participate in the decision-making and the direction so that they feel personally invested in what's going on.

Money Still Talks

After all is said and done, money is still the number one problem for administrators trying to recruit and retain an excellent IT staff.

"I am hearing stories of starting salaries at $22,000," says Caruso. "It's outrageous. People can't live on that."

She suggests that the CIO go to campus administration with some market data and increase the base salary, which is what she helped do successfully at University of Wisconsin.

The school's road to increasing IT salaries started in 1996 when state agencies, primarily located in Madison, and the university, were having problems recruiting and retaining IT staff. Salaries were 20-50 percent below market rate and turnover rates had reached 14 percent. So the Wisconsin Department of Employee Relations formed an IT advisory board made up of IT supervisors from state agencies and the university to figure out what they could do for IT staff.