Training, Flexible Schedules May Help Keep You at Your Job
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An August report on IT turnover rates from Computer Economics leads with the following interpretation of its research: Flexible schedules and training opportunities can be just as effective at and important to keeping you at a job as money and benefits. Do you agree? What's important to you? The annual survey bases its research on responses from 200 IT executives in the United States and Canada, and suggests that perceptions are that IT turnover rates are pretty high, even though the three-year trending has turnover pegged at about 5 percent at the median and 10 percent at the 75th percentile.
In its executive summary, CE suggests that 5 percent is an acceptable turnover rate. But the more interesting data in the piece comes later, which has to do with correlating all the different factors affecting turnovers and finding some common ground. Here are the factors:
The issue I see here is that base salary and incentive pay are ranked high in importance, yet the correlations between training, flexibility and retention are something, the survey suggests, to which your employers should be giving more attention. Computer Economics spends some significant effort in the research qualifying that idea. What do you think? Are you getting enough training and flexibility? |
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Comments (2)
My company has pretty much dropped all effective training entirely. When I joined many years ago, there was a wide variety of well-taught, human-instructor courses on a large number of relevant technical, business, and other topics. Now, there is almost nothing left other than on-line courses that are nearly worthless. Furthermore, at one time continuing education was valued and time was set aside for it. Today, there is no time at all to actually attend any class, either in person or online (and forget about getting travel money to attend a class out of town!). If you really, really want some of the mediocre education, you need to find time to do it on your own time. Of course, today's overall business mentality is that companies should hire someone who already has the precise requirements for a given job, then discard them when it's over - no more concept of getting good people and keeping them for a long time, making sure their skills grow and keep up with the times.
Posted by TA | August 25, 2008 8:26 AM
This research is interesting and actually mirrors a lot of what the 2007 Emerging Workforce Study reveals. Spherion started tracking workers attitudes and beliefs over 10 years ago and the most recent data takes a look at the huge disconnect between what employers and employees rank as top drivers of retention. For example, whereas workers ranked financial compensation, benefits and time/flexibility high on their list, employers top drivers of retention for workers is: management climate and supervisor relationship. In fact, time and flexibility was ranked last on the list.
Might be worth taking a look at. The findings are broken down by industries. Here is the link for IT workers: http://www.spherion.com/pressroom/file.php/211/IT-Workers-Profile-EW-FF.pdf.
Posted by Lesly | August 25, 2008 11:19 PM