MSPs bucking the trend in staff retention
Towards the end of last year, I had an interesting conversation with Kevin O’Loughlin, CEO at
Nostra, as part of a series of chats I had with several people on the state of the channel and what
we might expect in 2024 for a forthcoming article for TechCentral.ie.
Among other things, we were discussing the attractions for companies of using managed service
providers (MSPs) to provide service and support compared to trying to provide it with their own in-
house staff.
One of the obvious challenges for most businesses is finding and retaining the right IT staff. In a
world where such people are in high demand, is it can be very hard to find and keep them. Even if
you do, it can be difficult to get them to stay for a lengthy period of time when they are frequently
the recipients of alternative offers. The volatility in the IT sector means there is a huge demand for
people.
O’Loughlin noted that IT managers stayed, on average, for around two or three years at a
company. While he didn’t say it, that’s probably the point at which many of them have reached the
optimal point of usefulness to the company. Sadly, that’s also the point where many of them depart,
taking all their knowledge with them. That can be quite a blow for any company to absorb while
maintaining business as usual.
At which point, you might wonder why it should be any easier for MSPs to hire and keep their own
IT staff to provide the support and service their clients so desperately need. And at a time when
more and more potential customers might be attracted to the idea of outsourcing their IT function
as a service, it wouldn’t be particularly helpful if MSPs were subject to the same stresses and
strains with their own staff.
But according to O’Loughlin, IT people have a preference to work for MSPs. To be fair, he
advanced some fairly convincing reasons for making that argument. First of all, they work across a
broader range of customers and a wider range of systems. They’re not coming in to the company
building day in day out to work in the same place on the same systems.
Instead, they work for a range of customers, possibly including some of the biggest companies in
Ireland, and they have more access to training because of the variety and range of places and
systems they end up working on.
If you accept that one of the motivations for IT people to leave a company is that things start to feel
a little stale and dull after a while, then it surely follows that giving them a variety of customers and
systems to work with on a frequent basis is likely to act as a powerful motivator for them to stay at
an MSP. After all, even if they were to switch their job in the IT department at one company to
another, they’d only be swapping one system for another.
As for the companies themselves – the potential customers – one of the attractions of using an
MSP is that if someone does leave, it has far less impact than if they lost someone they employed
directly. In theory, the knowledge should be spread more widely across the MSP organisation with
more people capable of stepping in if required.
One possible distortionary effect on the Irish market is the presence of so many multinational
organisations that have recruited large numbers of IT staff over the years. But there’s also a
natural progression where, after a certain amount of time, those staff become tired of pinballing
between one large US company and another and look for something that’s more professionally
rewarding, challenging and varied.
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