Author: Cassie Torres

To better understand and support the tech workforce, it is crucial for executives and business leaders to understand the mindset of those working in this field. The tech workforce is driven by a desire to solve problems and make a difference. They are constantly seeking new challenges and opportunities to learn and grow.

This mindset enables the tech workforce to innovate and create new technologies that change the world. Understanding this mindset can help executives and business leaders better support the tech workforce and ensure that they remain motivated and engaged in their work.

Defining the Tech Workforce – Who They Are and What They Do

The tech workforce is an integral part of any modern economy. It consists of highly skilled professionals with expert knowledge and experience in the design, development, and deployment of new technologies.

The tech workforce is diverse, with individuals representing different levels of education and experience in their fields. Their multitude of varied skills include coding, software engineering, data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, user experience, network administration, and many more. They are innovators with the foresight to explore emerging trends and find solutions that give organizations competitive advantages.

It is no surprise that the tech workforce greatly influences our economic well-being. By understanding their needs and motivations, executives and business leaders can create more effective strategies to ensure the tech workforce is engaged in their work. This will ensure that business leaders harness the potential of the workforce to drive innovation and progress.

The Current State of the Tech Workforce

In the face of technology layoffs and economic uncertainty, now more than ever, the tech workforce needs to be resilient and adaptive. The data suggest that 2023 is on pace to surpass 2022 for global tech redundancies, with 234 tech companies laying off 75,912 employees in the first few weeks of the year. Last year, 1,024 tech companies laid off a total of 154,336 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Companies that want to remain competitive and productive must invest in training their employees to use emerging technology and stay ahead of industry trends. They can better anticipate technological advancement and plan for organizational changes by staying informed.

The tech workforce is also facing an unprecedented skills gap. With the rapid growth of emerging technologies, there is a need for individuals with specific technical skills to fill roles across all industries. As such, managers and executives must provide continuous learning and development opportunities for employees so they can stay up-to-date on technology trends.

It is also essential for organizations to ensure that their tech workforce feels valued and appreciated. This includes offering competitive salaries and benefits, recognizing employees’ accomplishments, providing clear career paths and opportunities for growth, and creating a supportive work environment where everyone is encouraged to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s success.

What are the Priorities of Tech Workers?

Tech workers understand the competitive and ever-changing industry they serve in. Their priorities reflect this culture of competition, with competitive wages and improved benefits at the top of the list. Tech workers also value a workplace that encourages flexibility and growth opportunities.

Additionally, tech workers are focused on developing new technologies that can help organizations operate more efficiently. They strive to develop creative solutions that can improve existing products and processes.

They’re looking for positions where they can develop their skills further without compromising on competitive pay and a competitive benefits package. They want to work for organizations that listen to their ideas, provide constructive feedback and guidance, and recognize their contributions.

According to a survey conducted by HBR:

• 88% of knowledge workers say that when searching for a new position, they will look for one that offers complete flexibility in their hours and location.

• 76% of the workers polled believe that employees will be more likely to prioritize lifestyle (family and personal interests) over proximity to work and will pursue jobs in locations where they can focus on both — even if it means taking a pay cut.
• 86% of employees said they would prefer to work for a company that prioritizes outcomes over output.
• 82% of employees and 62% of HR directors believe that workers will need to hone their current skills or acquire new ones at least once a year to maintain a competitive advantage in the global job market.

By understanding the priorities of tech workers and striving to meet their needs, executives and business leaders can create an environment where tech workers are engaged and motivated to innovate. These are just some of the priorities tech workers consider when evaluating a potential employer – an understanding of their competitive needs can offer employers a competitive edge when trying to fill these high-demand roles.

How Can Your Business Attract and Retain Tech Workers

Technology is essential for businesses to stay ahead in today’s competitive market. By attracting and retaining tech workers, you can maximize the benefits of having highly skilled knowledge workers as part of your team. These benefits may include increased productivity, new perspectives on problem-solving, and even the ability to scale up quickly and efficiently.

When hiring tech workers, offering competitive benefits packages and welcoming work culture are key factors to keep them around. Additionally, providing professional development opportunities such as mentoring or on-the-job training will help to foster loyalty and build positive relationships with employees. If your business commits itself to these initiatives, it can ensure success in attracting and retaining tech professionals.

Overall, understanding the mindset of tech workers and meeting their needs is essential for successful recruitment and retention. Executives and business leaders should strive to create an environment that encourages creativity and rewards innovation. By doing so, businesses can ensure a talented and engaged tech workforce who will help propel their organizations forward.

Tech Workers Are Essential Regardless of Industry

Technology workers are vital members of today’s workforce, regardless of the industry. From project managers to software engineers, these employees provide an essential knowledge base that keeps businesses operating efficiently and productively.

Tech-based firms may indeed depend on technology workers most heavily. Still, many businesses with a non-tech focus also rely heavily on their technical staff to stay competitive in fast-paced work environments. An HBR article sees the tech layoffs as “an incredible opportunity” for non-tech firms to hire skilled specialists.

Across all industries, technology workers enable companies to reach goals faster, increase productivity, enhance communication between departments and the public, or streamline processes—all while keeping costs low and high profits. In short, tech workers remain key players in all aspects of business success—regardless of the industry.

As the technology industry continues to grow and change, it’s important to distinguish between the tech industry as a whole and the talent that works within it. With recent layoffs from some of the biggest tech giants, many talented individuals with valuable skills are left without a job.

Although the current situation in the tech industry may seem bleak, there is still a strong demand for tech professionals across all industries. So where are all these laid-off techies going? Many are choosing to freelance or start their own businesses. Others are using their skills to fill gaps in other industries, such as healthcare, finance, and agriculture.

No matter where they end up, one thing is for sure: these workers will be instrumental in helping shape the future of our world. Is your business ready?

In the business world, time is money. So when it comes to software development, you want a company that can get the job done quickly and efficiently. 3Ci’s software solutions practice, Doozer Software, can do just that.

So, What’s a Doozer?

The Doozers are characters who love to work. They live to build things. They work together because they value cooperation to further the common good. When compared to other, they are by far the most technologically advanced. Most Doozers are construction workers, while others are architects or miners. With the help of various Doozer machines and vehicles, they build elaborate architecture and create innovative solutions.

The Doozers are prime examples of hard work and determination. They do their best to get the job done, no matter what obstacles come their way. Their ability to take on any task with enthusiasm and efficiency makes them highly valued by those who know of their capabilities. With boundless energy, Doozers work tirelessly until every job is finished, showing everyone that hard work pays off.

What Makes us Unique?

At its core, personability is key when working with people. By putting people first, we build relationships on trust and transparency while still achieving our goals through collaboration. Doozers are friendly and love to work as a team avoiding miscommunication or lack of understanding – everyone gets right to work in harmony. Working together encourages creativity and ensures that no person is ever made to feel alone in this process. It’s genuinely conducive to success and distinguishes us from competitors.

At 3Ci’s software solutions practice, custom-crafted software solutions and development are our specialties. Our highly experienced professionals provide high-caliber and cost-effective software solutions tailored to meet any requirements. We’ll meet you where you are and provide the best solution catered to your needs.

With deep experience in many programming languages and platforms, we stay ahead of the curve in software projects. We guarantee an engaging journey for our clients as we work on their desired projects and deliver custom-built quality results that exceed expectations.

Just ask Doozer – we’re always happy to help!

As the digital world continues to evolve and grow, companies are increasingly looking for software solutions to help their business succeed. At Doozer, we have the experience and know-how to help you craft a purposeful solution that meets your needs.

Whether designing new products or driving customer loyalty, our capabilities are unmatched in the industry. With decades of experience, we can take on any challenge and craft innovative solutions tailored specifically to your needs.

The possibilities are endless with Doozer! Click here to learn more about 3Ci and Doozer’s combined capabilities and how we can help you with your next software project.

“We do because we can.
We can because we’re blessed.
Since we are blessed to be can-do people,
we will always do the best we can.”

The Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, the Big Quit, whatever you want to call it, has dominated headlines for over a year now. When around 4 million people quit their jobs in April 2021 alone, a record high since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking voluntary job loss, it became clear that the recovery from the pandemic would be slow and unpredictable. This has continued to hold true as we approach summer 2022.

Initially, it was only thought to impact the retail, manufacturing, and hospitality sectors; after all, tech boomed during the pandemic with the rise of remote work. However, it’s become clear that even the tech industry isn’t safe, and could potentially be facing even worse post-pandemic consequences than other industries.

But to understand how to fight the Great Resignation, and hopefully avoid other impending obstacles, it’s essential to understand who is quitting, and what factors are influencing this mass exodus.

Hint, hint. It’s not who you think.

Who’s Quitting?

During the early stages of the Great Resignation, the charge was led by younger, less-tenured workers in low-paying industries like retail, food service, and health care. But now, the main growth in quit rates is coming from older, more tenured workers in higher-paid industries like finance, tech, and other knowledge worker fields, according to a Visier dataset from companies with over 1,000 employees. An EY survey discovered that the workers most likely to move jobs include managers and leaders in technology or finance roles.

Columbia Business School professor, Adam Galinsky, calls this iteration of the Great Resignation the “great midlife crisis.”

For the largest demographic groups, older millennials and baby boomers, flexibility has become a non-negotiable component of work. Many companies have tried to solve the Great Resignation through wage increases, but these workers are searching for less tangible benefits like meaning and balance because they’re often more financially sound. Quits are being driven by everything from a desire to continue working remotely to a greater search for meaning to simply having the means to do so.

Additionally, this becomes a growing concern with subject matter experts, who are often older, more tenured employees within the technology and finance sectors. This creates an invisible consequence of the Great Resignation: an enormous amount of information is lost when employees leave.

The Pandemic & Flexible Work

Now that the safety precautions from the pandemic have loosened, things are beginning to return to normal. This includes schools being fully opened, mask-mandates lifting, widespread vaccine distribution, and people returning to offices. However, after two years of working successfully from home, many knowledge workers are loath to return to the office due to the numerous benefits of remote work. Data from Slack’s ongoing survey of 10,000 knowledge workers found that with a third of them now back in the office five days a week, their work-related stress and anxiety have reached their highest level since the survey began in 2020.

Knowledge workers have gotten a taste for the potential flexibility available to them; can you blame them for not wanting to backtrack?

For large organizations, in particular, orchestrating a return-to-office has been particularly challenging compared to smaller companies, with 80 percent of smaller companies having fully reopened and only a third of the largest companies. Tech-giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have all had to push back their re-open goals due to employee pushback and logistical challenges. According to Worktech, some Apple employees have quit in protest of the 3-days a week hybrid schedule for being too inflexible.

This phenomenon has been one of the most significant contributors to the Great Resignation within the tech sectors. Workers crave flexibility, independence, and balance, all things that working in an office too often fail to provide.

Considerations for Tackling the Great Resignation

The Great Resignation poses a threat to businesses for countless reasons, but by being prepared and thinking outside of the box, leaders can remove the potential costs, both literal and intellectual, when employees leave. If you are currently experiencing an employee exodus, or soon will be, the time to act is now. Losing your top performers is not only costly on a short-term basis, but can set a tone for future generations of talent that staying with your company may not be worth it. The right incentives and investments can support you in retaining your most talented employees and help you attract new ones.

The retention statistics have been demoralizing, however, there are unique opportunities savvy organizations can take from this. Firstly, they can recognize that flexibility is the holy grail for employee retention. And when flexibility isn’t a viable option, they could offer employees career development opportunities to refine and enhance their skill set as an incentive to stay with the company.

This is the age of intellectual flexibility – when employees can leave a company and, rather than seek employment elsewhere, build their own businesses. This movement has grown in popularity over the years and will continue to do so as technology advances. Leaders must be prepared for this change by creating an environment where employees can grow; it is the best way to keep them on board and capitalize on your intellectual investment, rather than lose it to a competitor.

By fostering a flexible work environment that works for all parties, organizations can retain employees and benefit from the knowledge they spend years gaining.

But, is something worse brewing on the horizon?

Despite the Great Resignation, the tech industry has been flourishing and is largely one of the only industries to come out of the pandemic more successful than when they went into it (besides maybe hand sanitizer and mask manufacturers). However, there’s been mounting concerns that the good times are coming to an end. Ugly layoffs may be brewing across the board, some investors and industry watchers warn — from public tech giants to scrappy startups.

Even the seemingly untouchable Jeff Bezos has issued warnings about the shifting market. “Most people dramatically underestimate the remarkableness of this bull run.,” he tweeted on April 30. “Such things are unstoppable … until they aren’t. Markets teach. The lessons can be painful.”

Big tech companies including Meta, Salesforce and Netflix have also recently announced hiring freezes or layoffs in the midst of cost-cutting pressure and rising inflation. Tesla is cutting about 10% of its salaried workers. Online trading app and fintech darling Robinhood, which went public in July 2021 laid off 9% of its workforce in April. Netflix doubled its stock price during the height of the pandemic but has faced a massive 70% drop since November, forcing them to cut entire teams, including its newly created publication Tudum. Celebrity video app Cameo laid off roughly a quarter of its staff. Thrasio, a startup that aggregates hot brands on Amazon and has raised more than $3 billion, let go off roughly a fifth of its workforce recently. And startup-support firm On Deck has laid off 25% of its staff, around 72 people.

It seems that these waves of layoffs are only the beginning, especially considering the reported oversaturation of programmers. While it may be a bit early to start ringing the alarm bells, recognizing the potential issue and preparing appropriately can help businesses avoid catastrophe.

Imagine if your business had an adequate warning about the Great Resignation, what would you have done differently?

That’s the thought process that will keep your business successful, and competitive, regardless of what crisis is waiting around the corner.

The Technology industry is as unique as it is lucrative. It’s a high-demand, essential industry that is almost single-handedly shaping the future of consumer culture. We’re connected in ways humanity has never seen before, and the value of that connection is reflected in the value of the Big Five tech companies, all of whom contributed significantly to the current state of technology and communication. The world’s major tech companies— Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft— are collectively valued at over  $3.5 trillion, more than all but four countries’ economies in the world.

From the creation of the internet to the development of the smartphone, the domination of the tech industry has transformed the way the world operates. Cyberinfrastructure engineering and artificial intelligence research are expected to revolutionize the world and are poised to create millions of jobs and unprecedented growth. What’s often referred to as the “technology churn”, aka the constant, never-ending evolvement of technology as we know it, is what makes the industry so uniquely valuable, and uniquely challenging.

Every industry is competitive, of course, but when it comes to tech, if you’re not on the cutting edge of development, you’re falling behind. This is an industry where collaboration and connection matter above all else. There’s no advancement without industriousness, there’s no industry without community, and there’s no community without people.

After all, everyone is working towards the same goal: a more connected and intelligent world.

What Makes Connection so Powerful for your Business?

Maintaining strong connections within any industry is significant, particularly when working with other vendors and industry leaders. Building strategic, positive relationships can super-charge innovation and deliver a competitive advantage. Investments in connection and collaboration are investments in the future.

Think of it this way; when one collaborator wins, everyone wins, and when someone loses, there’s a strong support system to buoy them and mitigate the risk. The Tech industry is so uniquely fast-paced that the more trustworthy partners in your corner, the more success you’ll have and the less devastating your losses will be.

When your business is connected to the community, it creates an environment that fosters innovation and collective growth. By investing in the community your business operates within, you’re investing in not only the development of your business and brand but the development of the economy and culture, which will lead to greater success for everyone involved.

When your business connects to other businesses, even outside of your industry, unprecedented growth becomes possible. By sharing assets and intellectual property, opportunities become limitless. By investing in each other’s progress, you’re expediting the rate at which progress is made.

When your business collects with individuals, both fellow industry leaders and consumers, suddenly the work takes on a greater meaning. Your business develops a voice and message. Technology has one job, to make people’s lives better, so staying connected to the people being influenced is the key to long-term success.

At 3Ci, Connection is King

Community

A business is only as good as its people and the community surrounding it. Here at 3Ci, we’re proud to be a part of the booming Atlanta tech industry for over 40 years. This has enabled us to develop strong relationships with the local governing bodies, local businesses, and organizations.

Our community has always shown up for us, it’s only fair that we continuously show up for them as well. For us, showing up looks like offering a Diversity Scholarship to high school seniors, supporting voter registration initiatives, and partnering with Women in Tech as well as several other outreach programs within the community (including STEM Atlanta Women, SuccessTeam, and GirlUp).

Connecting with our community and supporting its growth has directly influenced 3Ci’s own success and reputation. This is a lesson we will always carry with us as we move into new markets (hello, Charlotte!) and continue to evolve.

Business

3Ci’s ability to connect with a business, understand their pain points and offer a unique solution is what makes 3Ci special. Every client we work with has a different problem they are trying to solve, but one thing that is consistent throughout each project is our commitment to our client.

We value transparency in every business relationship we have, whether it’s a complete end-to-end project or during the hiring process of new tech talent. We believe in our ability to solve your business’s problems and create a long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.

At 3Ci, maintaining a strong, positive connection with our business partners influences every aspect of how we conduct our business.

Individuals

Above all else, 3Ci cares and connects to people, whether it’s our internal staff, the people we place, or the partners we support. Building a strong interpersonal connection is key to providing successful solutions to any obstacle we’re presented with.

Here’s some feedback we’ve received recently to illustrate this point:

“I think consistent communication with feedback helps to build that relationship whether it is good, bad, or ugly. Builds trust and transparency that you aren’t just there to make a buck, but to better their lives and career!“ -Danny Sheets, Talent Specialist

Connection is an essential tool for all businesses, particularly within the competitive Tech space. That’s why 3Ci makes a point of painting strong connections with our community, our partners, and our people. To learn more about how 3Ci helps clients build the best tech teams, check out this blog.