How to Grow Talent From Within a Company Successfully

Problem

It's a mistake to think that everyone will do the same job forever in your team, especially in our extremely competitive environment. The company must offer various paths of evolution to keep the best talent. However, it can be difficult to offer a viable transition into tech. I once had a very good support engineer in a very stagnant position. We did not want to lose him, so we decided to transition him from support to tech.

Actions Taken

First of all, you need to make sure that the person is ready for the change. If not, they will fail. Once this has been clarified, I strongly believe that the employee must earn their spot. Therefore, we went through a classic interview process of multiple stages, tests, etc... Finally, you need to build a path that you both agree on. For the given example, the first step was to transition him to the production support team so that he could work closer with engineers and do some pair work. We also let him code on the side and gradually discover our codebase. After this phase, he finally integrated into the core tech team as part of the integration team where he worked on very scoped projects.

Lessons learned

We have used this model of transition from support to tech a few times since then, each time successfully. Spotting early on who your key employees are is extremely important, as you can start thinking about their path within the company and most importantly, involve them in the process when there's still time.