How are you managing to recruit/ appoint when job evaluation in education doesn’t allow for competing with IT salaries in the tech sector? What work around do you use please?
You might as well remove the word "IT" from the title and replace "education" with "the public sector". It applies to absolutely everyone. How do you recruit nurses? Environmental managers? Lecturers? Civil engineers? HR staff?
There are a number of options.
One employed of my experience took a loose interpretation of NHS guidelines and simply cut away 20% of their staff from the official salary scheme, allowing the employer to set market-competitive rates of pay to attract and retain talent. I tend not to recommend this. It's daring, but in an organization not creating any profit, it can be hard to justify in the long term.
In my opinion, the best option is to focus on upskilling your management. It is an old - but true - trope of recruitment that people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. Ergo, the more *good* (or, at least, competent and not actively malign) managers you have, the easier it will be to retain the staff you have, which is step one in recruitment.
The next step, when it comes to attracting new staff, is marketing, marketing, marketing. Public sector employment offers a huge number of advantages over private sector: better union engagement, better working conditions, better holiday, better pension, more of a sense of contributing something positive to the nation and your community... All of these are assets to the public sector recruiter that most public sector bodies are absolutely awful at marketing about themselves. Public sector employment is seen as dull, bureaucratic and old-fashioned. But there's no reason that this has to be true and public sector organizations can do a lot to change how they do business and invest in their own perception of themselves - let alone how others perceive them - to vastly improve their attractiveness to the employment market.
How many times do people have to hear that the "new" workforce (basically anyone under 40, so not all that new) isn't primarily motivated by money? Yes, money is important - especially at a time when the cost of living is rising - but it's not the *only* thing and too many public sector bodies don't understand the assets they have to leverage.
Can you tell that I'm working on this at the moment?
I did a lot of this when in recruitment - I used to recruit for what was CfBT when they did outsourced IT for some schools and also for a specialist IT provider to schools (who were based locally but covered a large area of schools).
I am in the Thames Valley so at the time schools could afford £16-18k for ICT co-ordinators and those companies were paying £20-22 for the same people to be on call support staff or an extra £2k ish for those needing to attend site.
The ONLY thing that was ever an obstacle for getting people to leave working for a school (or MAT) to go and work for one of those companies (as most applicants were making that jump) other than location was either a fear they wouldn't get as much free training as they got at the school or that they would have to do more during the holidays (one guy was a competitive windsurfer and it would have curtailed his windsurfing)
So if you are looking for them those are the things worth more than pure money - location, training (particularly if you can offer any certificated courses) and lower work load in holidays
The big draw of the other employers other than £ was career prospects - unless you are a MAT then ICT co-ordinator in a school is a bit dead end with too big a gap up to manager for most education establishments to consider internal promotion.
Usually for school IT work during holidays is more project based rather than reactive. It is when they do major upgrades and rollouts. But that does allow more planning and flex
You're right Robey, but it's also true that there are various initiatives to encourage women back into IT after starting a family which is why I hit on that demographic :)
