Training

Training and ongoing education are par for the course in Best Places IT groups. Interestingly, companies with standout IT retention rates don't boast of offering x hours of training per employee or y dollars for college courses.

Rather, their attitude is best summed up by W.W. Grainger Inc.'s Timothy Ferrarell: "When we have a job to do and skills people need to learn, we're going to get employees the training they need," says Ferrarell, senior vice president of enterprise systems at the $5.5 billion, Lake Forest, Ill.-based supplier of facilities maintenance products, which ranks No. 78. "We don't have a one-size-fits-all rule for training; it's based on company needs."

And because Grainger's business is "all about moving boxes and logistics," as Ferrarell puts it, the need for training is ceaseless. A few years back, Grainger dove into voice over IP by setting up a network that seamlessly transfers customer calls to any of the company's 400-plus branches.

More recently, Grainger threw the switch on a rollout of SAP AG 's enterprise software that SAP executives called, according to Ferrarell, "one of the largest single-instance implementations ever to go live in one day." Naturally, a project of that magnitude requires extensive consulting, but, Ferrarell says, "our bias is to do these things ourselves as much as possible. We want people who understand the business to do the IT work."