Question

Career developmemt and the imapct on talent retention. Focusing mainly on talent retention with atleast 2 or more sources.

Answer 1

Lack of career opportunities is the top reason for any employee to leave the job unless they are getting bullied or something similar. A lot of organizations face the problem in retaining employees. It is really expensive to replace employees who either leave for a better pay or are hired by their competitors. Recruiting new employees that much more effort and money than the salary of the employee who left.

There are certain career development initiatives that you as an employer can take to have a great rate of employee retention. As the demand for better talent is rising, companies are building career advancement strategies as a cost-effective way for retaining employees. Strategies include paying for various classes that employees attend for enhancing their skills, mapping paths to target positions, and also recruiting internal career coaches to groom their resumes. This may seem like preparing candidates so that they can be poached by competitors or other companies, but in fact, such initiatives raise employee morale and makes them more loyal towards your organization.

Promoting the concept of career lattice may also prove to be better for employees who are looking to move to different fields as their progress in their career path. It provides flexibility for progress, as any employee can make movement in either direction, up, sideways, or down, every movement will be considered as progress. Allow personalizing the career progression pace according to employee’s wish and current situation. Also, the company shall focus on results rather than focusing on the number of hours spent working.

In the end of the 1990’s the challenge of attracting and retaining talent grew to be at the top of the list of challenges faced by business executives. Employee retention is a critical issue for many organisations and managers, and that the cost of retention usually exceed 100% of the annual salary for the position. Employee retention is defined as “An effort by a business to maintain a working environment which supports current staff in remaining with the company. Many employee retention policies are aimed at addressing the various needs of employees to enhance their job satisfaction and reduce the substantial costs involved in hiring and training new staff”. Further regarding the issue of retaining talents, not many organisations are realising the existence of a retention problem, and that the high performing people, the talents, are the ones ending up leaving.

There are several reasons for why it is hard to retain talents; one of them can occur due to managers having different beliefs in why talents leave than what is actually true. For example, managers commonly believe that talents decide to leave due complicated job tasks, only wanting practical experience, too low salary or the fact they do not understand or cope with the company culture. However, the more correct reasons why they leave are not enough challenging job tasks, lack of personal development, no international career possibilities and low compatibility with colleagues.

There are differences and misconceptions also regarding why talents leave; the most common misconception is that employers have paid their talents too little money as an incentive to stay and the most common reasons why talents leave are dissatisfaction of integration with colleagues and a lack of perception of training and development in the future. So the experts are promoting future development and training before the talents start looking in other directions. The reasoning behind this is, not only are they dissatisfied, but also the fact that there is always another organisation willing to pay more, in both salary and bonuses.

Retaining talent should be a top priority for managers and that this should be accomplished by having a transparent work environment, with open communication and meetings on a regular basis. Also, the practice of cross-training and enabling employees to practice different roles within the company are important factors in the process of Talent Retention. Additionally, keeping employees challenged, daring to evaluate their performance, discuss goals as well as taking feedback into account in decision-making motivates employees and contributes to their retention. Organisations need to stress the importance of retaining talents through three areas of emphasis; “(1) Focus on employee development, learning and growth, (2) Cultivate a style that inspires loyalty, and (3) Create a work environment that people love”. The first area implies that the company should find ways to develop the employees and identifying opportunities. This can be done through innovative and challenging work-tasks and by offering a mentor or coach. The second area, can be exercised through asking the employees what they value in their work and by giving feedback and rewards. Moreover, in order to create a work environment that people love, the company should give the employees space as well as promote openness and enable the employees to discuss freely about their ideas, experiences and opinions.

Another aspect of Talent Retention is the term Talents on hold, when successfully retaining talents but putting them on hold in positions that they are overqualified for; due to the organisation not having enough top- or specialist positions for their talents. This may lead to that the talents choose to work for a competitor instead. This becomes a dilemma for organisations, because educating talents who are not needed implies educating them for your competitor. Similarly, educating too few talents means that you end up with having to hire them from elsewhere. Reason being that there is a time and resource heavy procedure to hire someone of high calibre, and at the same time, that you are not certain about his or her abilities and if they fit into the company culture, compared to developing your own talents. Therefore would a so-called just-in-time mind-set regarding talent development be in good use, where you calculate and forecast the number of talents needed for the future.