Higher ed IT professionals tend to stay at institutions for extended stretches — sometimes entire careers — in ways that aren’t typical of IT professionals in other sectors. That stability has real value. It also creates a specific vulnerability: When a long-tenured engineer leaves, they don’t just take their skills; they take institutional knowledge that often exists nowhere else. A system nobody else knows how to run. A work-around built years ago that official documentation never captured. A budget decision that was made around one person’s ability to maintain one fragile thing.
Layoffs are real. Hiring freezes are real. The urgency is here now.
If budgets are too tight to fund professional development (PD) as its own line item, the institutions making progress aren’t waiting for one. Instead, they’re building PD into purchases they’re already making. EDUCAUSE’s workforce data shows why this matters: Institutions are expecting IT budget cuts this year, and when belts tighten, hiring freezes and staff travel are usually the first things to go, along with professional development. But every new system platform or funded vendor contract is itself a training opportunity that does not show up on the separate budget line. Higher ed–specific IT staffing providers already bill “full knowledge transfer” into their engagements as a core deliverable, not an add-on. There’s no reason a software or infrastructure purchase should look any different.
LEARN MORE: Build IT skills and professional development with next-gen courses.
Embed Professional Development Into Tech Purchases
Retention in higher ed IT isn’t primarily a salary story, though salary matters. It’s a relevance story. Staff stay when they believe the institution is invested in keeping them current, and not just useful today but relevant tomorrow.
The most practical lever available right now: Stop treating professional development as a nice-to-have line item that disappears when budgets get tight.
- Bake professional development into every technology purchase instead. When evaluating a new platform or system, ask what certifications or training can be included as part of the deal. Industry-recognized credentials carry weight. Staff can put those letters on LinkedIn. They can carry them if they leave, and ironically that investment into their development is exactly why they stay.
- Pair external engineers with internal IT staff during an implementation rather than let it be a handoff. CDW’s staff augmentation model already supports this and more institutions should be using this approach deliberately.
- Make knowledge transfer an explicit deliverable in the scope of work. By the time the engagement ends, your team should be able to run, maintain and troubleshoot the system. You’ve retained your people and upgraded their skills without a new hire.
DISCOVER: Trainings and certifications to support your IT teams.
How To Reframe and Fund Higher Ed IT Professional Development as Risk Management
The unique nature of higher education workforces — especially the tendency for staff, and particularly those in IT and operational roles, to remain at institutions for extended periods and sometimes entire careers — creates both stability and risk. The stability of long-tenured staff maintains continuity, but it also means institutional knowledge can be lost all at once when long-tenured employees leave. The recent EDUCAUSE 2026 Workforce Report backs up the risk side, finding that among those institutions taking no action on workload challenges, 41% report turnover that specifically reduced their capacity to meet strategic priorities. Equally, 57% say their teams have been pushed into reactive rather than proactive mode because of staffing decreases. When long-tenured IT and operations staff who hold irreplaceable institutional knowledge depart without a trained successor, the result is legacy systems that no one can maintain and delays or failures in mission-critical operations.
DISCOVER: IT leadership conferences that connect CIOs and senior IT leaders on top priorities.
For budget conversations, tie development to institutional risk, not just as a perk. Position professional development spend as:
- Business continuity insurance, which is cheaper than a major failure or emergency replatform
- A protection against costly re-hiring in a tight IT labor market
- A multiplier, not a one-off, by creating an internal training opportunity so one person’s conference or certification becomes a session for the whole team
- A condition of approval of large tech purchases, ensuring it includes a plan for who gets trained, how and on what timeline
The institutions that retain IT talent long-term aren’t just offering jobs. They’re offering careers and visible paths for growth, recognition when things go right and proof that investment goes both ways. None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires using the one you already have differently by embedding professional development into every tech purchase, writing knowledge transfer into every contract, and treating skill relevance as the retention strategy that it actually is. The institutions that get this right won’t just keep their IT staff, they will keep what their staff know. The ones that don’t will keep paying for it in burnout, in lost institutional system knowledge and in systems nobody left can run. The choice is that simple: Invest in professional development or pay for its absence later.
