Switching Gears

  Career Development  

Most of us are stuck in second gear. An employee leaves, and we replace them with a professional with similar strengths and technical expertise. Why? Because that is the job that is vacated, right? Wrong! If you want to throw your department into third, gain some speed and match business growth along with your staff, think outside the...'er, car...and hire outside the job description to support business needs.

Traditionally, the job families and hierarchy of IT job descriptions have been well defined. It is typical for you to hire a person with a matching skill set to that of the employee leaving. But why stop there? Why are you limited by those rigid constraints when the business needs so much more from IT?

Think "big picture" here with me, folks. Examine where you know your business is headed and then compare the talent you have on staff. In a nutshell, hire by examining your future instead of your business past. Begin hiring people based on your business need first, then examining the talent you already have on staff. This will empower you to hire people with skills that will support the business needs rather than the rigidity of a job description, enabling you to dig yourself out of the "tit for tat" mentality of job specifications.

Let's look at an example. Say your production database administrator decides to leave the company and …

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