During a recent customer meeting, a Director of Software Development raised the challenge of retaining talent in his development team.  He explained that his company does not pay the best in their area, there were plenty of opportunities for developers to move on, and his team often is the target of aggressive recruiters looking to fill roles. Yet he continues to retain his top talent.

Naturally, I asked him to elaborate. One of his key retention strategies was to make sure his developers have access to the latest and greatest technology, even if the company had no immediate plans to deploy it. In fact, they tended to be a little behind the curve in terms of rolling out new frameworks or methods. By their nature, developers are keen to learn new technologies, so he uses training (the InnerWorkings .NET Learning Platform, in this instance) as a retention tool for his teams.

He touched upon a common problem in managing software teams. Developers want to get their hands on cutting edge technology, they want to learn new methods, and experiment with new functionality.  However, often the company itself is not ready to migrate its current apps or even risk developing with new frameworks until they are proven to be stable and provide a significant performance improvement.  The risk is just too high. This conundrum is amplified in large companies where stability is valued above all else, even when compared to significant performance improvement.

The concept of training as a retention tool is not unique to development teams. Ben Horowitz, former CEO of Opsware and currently  co-founder and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, specifically mentions lack of training as 1 of 2 reasons why people leave companies. In his blog, Why Start-ups Should Train Their People, under point number 4 on employee retention, he states:

After putting economics, aside, I found the two primary reasons why people quit:

1. They hated their manager – generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development and feedback they were receiving.
2. They weren’t learning anything – the company wasn’t investing in the employees.

Although Ben’s blog is specific to start-ups, I believe the general principle holds true at companies of any size. People leave if they feel stagnant, or at least your best people do. For the most part, developers accept the rules of this enterprise stability requirement. They still want exposure to bleeding edge technologies and like to expand their personal knowledge, even if they know they won’t get to use it in production code for quite some time.

Any developer training program worth its salt is inclined towards creative problem solving and allows developers to ‘cut their teeth’ on new technologies safely removed from the fortress of production code. At InnerWorkings, we describe our .NET Learning Platform as a coding sandbox for this very reason. The empowerment of solving coding problems and experiencing new technologies outside the constraints of a production environment offers many advantages beyond retention.

During our discussion, this particular Director of Software Development also suggested that I read Paul Glen’s book, Leading Geeks, which examines what motivates developers. Glen’s observation of the most commonly held values of developers are:

• Developing knowledge
• Creating intricate and beautiful systems
• Proving potential
• Making money
• Helping others
• Enhancing career growth

I came to appreciate that my customer tapped into several of his team’s most common values in a unique way. This not only dramatically assisted his retention efforts, but it empowered his team and led to more thorough research and efficient deployment of new applications.

The higher levels of knowledge and experience his team gained by learning to use emerging technologies really made a tangible difference to his software organization on many levels.

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The word “roadmap” tends to make honest product managers quiver; it provokes a similar reaction from software development managers. Nonetheless, we’ve been working hard on our .NET learning roadmap at InnerWorkings.

I’ll be walking through the full roadmap in future posts, but let’s start at the start shall we?

Hot on the heels of our most popular New Features in C# 4.0 release last month, we’re turning our attention to another core area of .NET 4.0 for professional developers.

Now it’s time to tackle <insert drum roll> the wildly popular ASP.NET MVC 2!

We figure that if Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie have co-written a book about it, you just know it’s going to be a big deal.

So what aspects of ASP.NET MVC 2 have we decided to cover for the intrepid professional software developer with some room in their brains for new skills?

Here’s the shortlist of topics that made the cut into our MVC 2 training:

• Introduction to MVC 2
• Using Controllers, Actions, and Views
• Templated Helpers
• MVC 2 validation and DataAnnotation support
• Using Filters in MVC 2
• Using AJAX with MVC 2
• Using Areas with MVC 2

I should point out that this outline is an update on our existing ASP.NET MVC Fundamentals training, so it’s well vetted content updated for the latest release of MVC.

Look out for an announcement on this blog once we release our MVC 2 training; it’s currently in development and will be coming soon.

I’ll be covering future InnerWorkings roadmap topics in my next post but here’s a hint — if you’re a Visual Basic developer, you won’t be disappointed with what comes after MVC 2.

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