No Career Path, No Retention

(From Forbes) -- It seems to me that most organizations spend an inordinate amount of energy on talent acquisition. Finding, attracting and capturing the best talent is central on every organization’s radar. But the value derived from new talent is only realized if the talent can be retained long enough to tap its treasures.

Perhaps our interest in acquiring talent is human nature. We love the thrill of the hunt as well as the chase – it’s exhilarating, and if we catch our prey, we feel rewarded. Having collected the prize, the thought of owning it, maintaining and nurturing it does not give us the same heady dopamine spike we felt during the hunt. And so it is with retention. Having selected top talent, it becomes hard work to draw out its potential, develop its capabilities further and satisfy it to make it want to stay.

This problem exists everywhere, but multi-nationals operating in high growth markets are feeling the brunt of its effects: high turnover, low commitment, and job-hopping.

How can your organization channel top talent to want to hop around within your own organization? There are 3 questions that must be answered in the affirmative:

1. Are there real career opportunities available?

2. Are they visible to your talent pool?

3. Are there support structures that facilitate internal career moves?

The question of available opportunities

Even if you answered ‘yes’, many organizations underestimate the total career opportunities available to their employees.

Why? Because their mindset is about traditional career paths that are hierarchical, based on technical proficiency and past performance, not potential. Thinking based on that combination typically shrinks the number of opportunities to only a few options up an already narrow ladder.

What if you were able to tap the latent interests, experience, education and skills in your workforce and apply them in ways previously unused? Just recently I was in a conversation with a retail chain store manager who remarked, “We have hundreds of floor sales staff working with us while they are pursuing a college education. In a year or two when they graduate, they will have business, marketing, IT and other degrees. In that time, they have got to know our business well, understand our strategy and customers, and then we lose most of them because they go to get ‘real jobs’ that utilize their new professional skills. And all the while, we are recruiting for business, marketing and IT professionals from the external market because we need those skills too.” It seems crazy but this is a reality played out in organizations around the world every day.

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