1 Out of 4 IT Professionals Considers Quitting in Next 6 Months

One quarter of IT professionals are seriously contemplating leaving their current jobs within the next six months, potentially costing US companies upwards of $145 billion, according to the Defending IT Talent Report from Ivanti.


These statistics highlight the pressing need for organizations to relieve the burden experienced by IT professionals due to the shift to hybrid and remote work.

According to the research, IT professionals are 1.4 times more likely to disengage and "quiet quit" their jobs compared to other knowledge workers. Furthermore, a mere 8% of organizations are prioritizing automation for repetitive tasks in 2023, despite its potential to alleviate the workload pressures faced by IT teams.

The report reveals several key challenges faced by IT professionals and security experts:

■ 73% increase in workloads due to hybrid or remote working, leading to 1 in 4 reporting burnout.

■ 23% cite loss of connection to colleagues compared to just 17% of office workers.

■ 2.5 times more likely to work longer hours when working remotely.

■ Among the quarter considering quitting their jobs, 31% report their mental health is suffering. 

Despite these challenges, the vast majority of IT professionals (84%) want to continue to work remotely at least some of the time.

Organizations continue to struggle to retain IT talent — and it is costing them productivity gains and affecting their bottom line

"IT teams are the driving force making Everywhere Work a reality for organizations, yet they are grappling with a heavy workload," said Jeff Abbott, CEO at Ivanti. "In fact, organizations continue to struggle to retain IT talent (a decades long problem) — and it is costing them productivity gains and affecting their bottom line. Companies must embrace automation to alleviate IT workloads, ultimately fostering a destination environment that retains premier IT professionals and cultivates a competitive advantage. We've spent years digitally transforming all corners of the business, now is the time to transform the IT environments and help the people that make all of the transformation possible."

The report emphasizes that IT talent disengagement, quiet quitting, and turnover are not a result of remote work itself but stem from the lack of resources, tools, and support available to these employees.

The report outlines six actionable steps businesses can take to enable Everywhere Work for IT and security professionals:

Diagnose IT work-life pressure points

Use internal surveys and one-on-ones to get a pulse on mindsets at work. From there, take note of the specific pressure points brought on by hybrid and remote work.

Inventory tech-specific experiences

IT talent report higher rates of dissatisfaction with the tools they use when working offsite (nearly 1 in 4 say this). By tracking digital employee experience (DEX), the insights can help pinpoint areas that need attention/investment.

Prioritize automation for IT workflows

To free up IT talent for more valuable projects, invest in technology that handles repetitive tasks automatically and apply workflow automation to both employee-facing activities as well as back-office workflows.

Adopt proactive solutions

To minimize help desk tickets, deploy so-called "self-healing" systems that use a combination of AI, machine learning and remote monitoring to resolve workplace technology slowdowns before an employee is even aware of the problem.

Give employees choices about how they work

Offer IT talent the chance to define the work style that suits their individual circumstances, and in doing so, boost IT recruitment and retention.

Foster in-person connection for IT teams

Face-to-face meetings present an opportunity to build trust and camaraderie. It's easier to have a connection with someone on the other side of the screen if the team just spent the day having lunch and hanging out together.

Methodology: To gain a better understanding of the impact of Everywhere Work on IT talent, Ivanti surveyed 1,800 IT professionals and C-level executives across the globe. The goal was to get a pulse on the quality of their work lives, the impact of flexible and hybrid work arrangements on workload, and what organizations can do to support and retain high-value IT talent.

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1 Out of 4 IT Professionals Considers Quitting in Next 6 Months

One quarter of IT professionals are seriously contemplating leaving their current jobs within the next six months, potentially costing US companies upwards of $145 billion, according to the Defending IT Talent Report from Ivanti.


These statistics highlight the pressing need for organizations to relieve the burden experienced by IT professionals due to the shift to hybrid and remote work.

According to the research, IT professionals are 1.4 times more likely to disengage and "quiet quit" their jobs compared to other knowledge workers. Furthermore, a mere 8% of organizations are prioritizing automation for repetitive tasks in 2023, despite its potential to alleviate the workload pressures faced by IT teams.

The report reveals several key challenges faced by IT professionals and security experts:

■ 73% increase in workloads due to hybrid or remote working, leading to 1 in 4 reporting burnout.

■ 23% cite loss of connection to colleagues compared to just 17% of office workers.

■ 2.5 times more likely to work longer hours when working remotely.

■ Among the quarter considering quitting their jobs, 31% report their mental health is suffering. 

Despite these challenges, the vast majority of IT professionals (84%) want to continue to work remotely at least some of the time.

Organizations continue to struggle to retain IT talent — and it is costing them productivity gains and affecting their bottom line

"IT teams are the driving force making Everywhere Work a reality for organizations, yet they are grappling with a heavy workload," said Jeff Abbott, CEO at Ivanti. "In fact, organizations continue to struggle to retain IT talent (a decades long problem) — and it is costing them productivity gains and affecting their bottom line. Companies must embrace automation to alleviate IT workloads, ultimately fostering a destination environment that retains premier IT professionals and cultivates a competitive advantage. We've spent years digitally transforming all corners of the business, now is the time to transform the IT environments and help the people that make all of the transformation possible."

The report emphasizes that IT talent disengagement, quiet quitting, and turnover are not a result of remote work itself but stem from the lack of resources, tools, and support available to these employees.

The report outlines six actionable steps businesses can take to enable Everywhere Work for IT and security professionals:

Diagnose IT work-life pressure points

Use internal surveys and one-on-ones to get a pulse on mindsets at work. From there, take note of the specific pressure points brought on by hybrid and remote work.

Inventory tech-specific experiences

IT talent report higher rates of dissatisfaction with the tools they use when working offsite (nearly 1 in 4 say this). By tracking digital employee experience (DEX), the insights can help pinpoint areas that need attention/investment.

Prioritize automation for IT workflows

To free up IT talent for more valuable projects, invest in technology that handles repetitive tasks automatically and apply workflow automation to both employee-facing activities as well as back-office workflows.

Adopt proactive solutions

To minimize help desk tickets, deploy so-called "self-healing" systems that use a combination of AI, machine learning and remote monitoring to resolve workplace technology slowdowns before an employee is even aware of the problem.

Give employees choices about how they work

Offer IT talent the chance to define the work style that suits their individual circumstances, and in doing so, boost IT recruitment and retention.

Foster in-person connection for IT teams

Face-to-face meetings present an opportunity to build trust and camaraderie. It's easier to have a connection with someone on the other side of the screen if the team just spent the day having lunch and hanging out together.

Methodology: To gain a better understanding of the impact of Everywhere Work on IT talent, Ivanti surveyed 1,800 IT professionals and C-level executives across the globe. The goal was to get a pulse on the quality of their work lives, the impact of flexible and hybrid work arrangements on workload, and what organizations can do to support and retain high-value IT talent.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

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