Unlocking the Potential Within: How IT Leaders Find and Cultivate Hidden Tech Talent

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the search for skilled IT professionals is a constant challenge for organizations. New technologies emerge at a dizzying pace, creating demand for specialized expertise that often outstrips the available talent pool. While companies frequently look externally to fill these critical roles, many overlook a valuable resource right under their noses: their existing employees.

Within any organization, tech employees possess a wealth of skills, many of which are highly transferable. Beyond specific programming languages or platform knowledge, individuals often have strong foundational abilities such as problem-solving, analytical thinking, project management, effective communication, and a fundamental understanding of technical logic. These skills, sometimes referred to as 'soft skills' or core competencies, are crucial for adapting to new tools, mastering unfamiliar domains, and successfully navigating complex projects.

By recognizing and nurturing these transferable skills, IT leaders can not only address talent gaps more efficiently but also foster employee growth and retention. This requires a deliberate shift in perspective, moving beyond focusing solely on day-to-day tasks to considering the broader capabilities that can enable employees to thrive in different roles and with emerging technologies.

Jill Stefaniak, chief learning officer at Litmos, emphasizes this point, stating that IT managers should think about broader skills that can help employees succeed in different roles and with new technologies. Key transferable skills she highlights include coding logic, problem-solving, data analysis, project management, and communication abilities – skills particularly valuable in a rapidly changing tech environment.

George Fironov, co-founder and CEO of Talmatic, a concierge hiring service for developers, adds that evaluating an employee's skills with a focus on transferability is key. He notes that a developer skilled in one language can quickly pick up another if they have solid training in logical thinking, algorithms, and design patterns.

To illustrate how this concept translates into practice, we explored the approaches taken by IT leaders at several companies that have successfully built pipelines for identifying and leveraging internal tech talent. Their methods vary, but all share a common goal: to uncover the hidden potential within their existing teams.

Diverse Approaches to Uncovering Internal Talent

Redgate Software: A Personal, Manager-Led Discovery

At Redgate Software, Chris Smith, director of engineering, prioritizes transferable skills such as a strong eagerness to learn, empathy for customers, solid business understanding, effective collaboration and communication, and technical adaptability. Smith's approach to identifying these skills is deeply personal and manager-led, eschewing formal, rigid tools like skills charts or tests in favor of close relationships and ongoing conversations.

Smith's managers maintain close connections with their team members through regular one-on-one meetings. This allows them to gain a nuanced understanding of each person's current capabilities and potential for growth. Smith then collates these insights from across his teams to build a comprehensive picture of the organization's technical skills, identifying areas of strength, existing gaps, and potential future placements for employees.

In addition to ongoing dialogue, Redgate conducts quarterly mini-reviews focused on skills development, allowing employees and managers to discuss areas for growth. An annual skills survey also provides a broader, organizational-level view of skills and gaps, although it's not analyzed at an individual level by leadership.

Smith shared a compelling example of this approach in action: a long-term employee who successfully navigated multiple role transitions within the company. This individual began in product support, a role demanding detailed product knowledge and deep customer empathy. Leveraging these foundational skills, they transitioned to a test engineer position, where their technical insight and attention to detail were invaluable. Their interest in automated testing in this role served as a natural bridge to developing coding skills, eventually leading to a software engineer position focused on full software development.

Through Redgate's internal re-teaming process, this employee later moved to a team managing internal systems, specifically working on a Salesforce migration. Their technical background and understanding of product processes enabled them to successfully become a Salesforce engineer, mastering technologies like Apex and Flow. This journey exemplifies how a personal, manager-driven approach, combined with opportunities for development and movement, can unlock significant internal talent.

Lexmark: Blending Formal Evaluation with Experiential Learning

Sudhir Mehta, global vice president, Optra products and engineering at Lexmark, highlights a growth mindset and the willingness to learn new tools, frameworks, and methodologies as critical transferable skills. Lexmark employs a multi-faceted approach to identify these skills, combining formal and informal methods.

Regular performance evaluations and one-on-one meetings provide structured opportunities for managers to assess employee skills and discuss career aspirations. Day-to-day observations of how employees tackle challenges and collaborate also offer valuable insights.

Beyond these standard practices, Lexmark utilizes “Focus to Future” events. These initiatives allow engineering team members to step outside their usual roles, team up, brainstorm, and build prototypes. These events serve as practical showcases where managers can observe employees demonstrating skills that might not be apparent in their daily tasks, such as leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, and communication. This experiential learning environment makes it easier to spot individuals ready for new roles or greater responsibilities.

Mehta provided an example of an IT developer who transitioned from working on ERP applications to a data engineering role for an IoT platform solution. This developer possessed a strong technical background and demonstrated excellent problem-solving skills. To support this transition, the employee participated in Lexmark’s AI Academy, further developing their capabilities in relevant areas.

In their new data engineering role, the employee implemented innovative solutions that significantly impacted the company. They automated data pipelines and developed a lakehouse framework, dramatically improving efficiency. This resulted in impressive cost reductions: data orchestration costs decreased by over 65%, and deployment and operations costs fell by more than 50%. This case demonstrates how combining formal assessment, experiential learning, and targeted development can successfully leverage internal talent for high-impact roles.

HireVue: Embracing Structured, Standardized Assessments

Nathan Mondragon, chief innovation officer at HireVue, emphasizes critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and teamwork as key transferable skills. Mondragon advocates for a structured and standardized approach to identifying these skills, arguing that it provides greater objectivity compared to subjective traditional methods like performance reviews, where different managers might interpret skills like teamwork differently.

Mondragon manages a startup team at HireVue comprising individuals from diverse backgrounds including science, product, data, and engineering. He recommends implementing quantitative assessment methods that objectively measure soft skills and cognitive abilities. One such method is AI-based skills validation through interview assessments.

These AI-based assessments analyze interview responses based on best practices in structured interviewing. Questions are designed to elicit specific skills and behaviors. The AI analyzes the content of the responses to identify evidence of these skills being demonstrated. While primarily used for pre-hire assessments, Mondragon notes that this approach can also be valuable for identifying transferable skills in current employees.

Another technique Mondragon employs is the traditional question-and-answer situational simulation. In this method, employees are presented with a scenario or situation and asked how they would respond. These types of setups are effective for evaluating how individuals interact with others and the decision-making processes they employ, such as whether they analyze data to inform their choices.

By utilizing these structured techniques, organizations can move beyond subjective evaluations and create a more objective framework for identifying and leveraging transferable skills. This allows for a clearer understanding of an employee's problem-solving abilities, communication skills, adaptability, and potential for learning new technologies or transitioning into different roles.

Criteria: Real-Work Observations and AI-Powered Feedback

Chris Daden, chief technology officer at Criteria Corp., focuses on problem-solving, communication, and analytical thinking as crucial transferable IT skills. He believes these are as critical as specific technical knowledge like coding or security. Daden provides examples: a security analyst's attention to detail can translate well to a DevOps skill set, and a help desk technician's troubleshooting mindset can be a strong foundation for a transition into cybersecurity.

Daden finds that traditional methods like performance reviews don't always reveal the full spectrum of an employee's skills, particularly in the dynamic IT field. He believes the most effective way to identify transferable skills is through real-world observation during projects, mentorship opportunities, and data-driven assessments.

Criteria also utilizes AI-powered assessments designed to look at skills in more flexible ways. These tools can analyze interview transcripts or conversation notes and use smart rating mechanisms to fairly measure an employee's potential beyond their current role or explicit experience. This helps uncover an employee's true capabilities and potential for growth.

A specific tool used at Criteria is Coach Bo, an AI bot that engages employees in weekly conversations. Programmed with each employee's personality and skills profile, Coach Bo can understand unstructured feedback. This ongoing interaction helps to spot transferable skills, identify areas where upskilling is needed, and suggest potential career growth paths. By collecting and analyzing these regular interactions, the company gains continuous insights into employees' critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, and adaptability across different roles.

Mphasis: The Power of Observation and Learning Agility

Srikumar Ramanathan, chief solutions officer at Mphasis, seeks a strong curiosity or desire to learn, coupled with solid problem-solving and analytical thinking abilities, in his IT team members. He emphasizes that the desire to learn is paramount in the fast-changing tech environment, as continuous learning is essential for staying relevant.

Ramanathan finds formal skills evaluation methods, such as performance appraisals, insufficient for identifying these key transferable skills. He views performance reviews as 'lag indicators' that reflect past results rather than current capabilities or potential.

Instead, Ramanathan relies heavily on direct, day-to-day observation. He pays close attention to how team members approach problems, adapt to new developments, and contribute during meetings and projects. This real-time insight provides a more accurate picture of an individual's learning mindset, problem-solving approach, and adaptability than periodic formal reviews.

By observing their approaches to addressing problems or opportunities, how they adapt to new things, and their general curiosity, Ramanathan believes he can gain a deeper understanding of their transferable skills and potential for future roles within the organization.

The Importance of Transferable Skills in IT

The insights from these IT leaders underscore a fundamental truth in the modern workforce: technical skills, while essential, have a limited shelf life in a world of rapid technological advancement. What remains constant and increasingly valuable are the underlying cognitive and interpersonal abilities that enable individuals to learn, adapt, and collaborate effectively.

Transferable skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and adaptability are the bedrock upon which new technical expertise is built. An employee with strong analytical skills and a curious mindset is far more likely to successfully learn a new programming language, master a complex cloud platform, or adapt to an agile development methodology than someone who only possesses narrow, current technical knowledge.

Identifying and leveraging these skills within the existing workforce offers numerous benefits:

• **Reduced Hiring Costs and Time:** Promoting from within is often significantly faster and less expensive than external recruitment.
• **Increased Employee Retention:** Investing in employee development and providing pathways for internal mobility boosts morale, engagement, and loyalty. Employees are more likely to stay with an organization that supports their growth.
• **Preservation of Institutional Knowledge:** Internal candidates already understand the company culture, processes, and history, which can be invaluable in new roles.
• **Faster Onboarding and Productivity:** Internal hires typically require less time to get up to speed compared to external recruits.
• **Improved Team Dynamics:** Internal promotions can strengthen team cohesion and provide positive examples of career progression.
• **Agility in Responding to Market Changes:** A workforce with strong transferable skills is better equipped to pivot and adapt to new technological demands and market shifts.

Methods for Identifying Transferable Skills

As demonstrated by the examples above, identifying transferable skills requires a deliberate and often multi-pronged approach. Relying solely on traditional job descriptions or performance metrics tied to current roles can obscure an employee's potential.

Effective methods include:

• **Regular One-on-One Meetings:** Managers should use these sessions not just for task updates but for career discussions, understanding employee interests, and observing how they approach challenges.
• **Performance Reviews Focused on Competencies:** Structuring reviews to assess behaviors and underlying skills (like collaboration, problem analysis, learning agility) in addition to task performance.
• **Project-Based Observations:** Assigning employees to diverse projects or stretch assignments allows managers to see how they perform in new contexts and demonstrate skills beyond their usual responsibilities.
• **Skills Assessments (Formal and Informal):** This can range from self-assessments and manager evaluations to more structured tests or AI-powered tools that analyze cognitive abilities and behavioral traits.
• **Experiential Learning Events:** Hackathons, internal innovation challenges, or cross-functional projects provide opportunities for employees to showcase skills in a low-stakes environment.
• **Mentorship and Coaching:** Pairing employees with mentors can help identify hidden talents and provide guidance on developing transferable skills.
• **Utilizing Technology:** AI-powered platforms and HR tech tools can help analyze communication patterns, project contributions, and assessment results to identify skill patterns and potential.
• **Encouraging Self-Identification:** Creating a culture where employees feel empowered to communicate their interests and perceived transferable skills.

Challenges and Considerations

While the benefits are clear, implementing a strategy to identify and leverage internal talent isn't without challenges. Managers may be reluctant to lose valuable team members to other departments. Employees might not be aware of the opportunities available or how their current skills translate to different roles. Identifying 'soft' or transferable skills objectively can also be more difficult than assessing technical proficiency.

Organizations must create a culture that actively supports internal mobility and continuous learning. This involves:

• **Leadership Buy-in:** Senior leadership must champion the importance of internal talent development.
• **Transparent Career Pathways:** Clearly communicating potential career paths and the skills required for different roles.
• **Investment in Training and Development:** Providing resources for employees to acquire new technical skills or enhance their transferable ones (e.g., communication workshops, project management courses, technical training programs).
• **Manager Training:** Equipping managers with the skills to identify transferable skills, have career conversations, and support employee transitions.
• **Breaking Down Silos:** Encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing across departments to make it easier for employees to move internally.

Conclusion

In the competitive landscape for IT talent, looking inward is not just a cost-saving measure; it's a strategic imperative. The hidden potential within an organization's existing workforce, particularly in the form of transferable skills, represents a vast, often untapped resource. By adopting deliberate strategies – whether through personal manager engagement, formal assessments, experiential learning, or leveraging technology like AI – IT leaders can uncover these valuable capabilities.

Companies like Redgate, Lexmark, HireVue, Criteria, and Mphasis demonstrate that success in this area comes from a commitment to understanding employees beyond their current job titles. By focusing on core competencies like problem-solving, learning agility, communication, and adaptability, organizations can build a more resilient, adaptable, and engaged IT workforce, ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow's technology landscape by leveraging the talent they already possess today.