More than two-thirds of HR professionals are struggling to recruit candidates for full-time positions, SHRM’s 2016 report “The New Talent Landscape” found. One clear takeaway: retaining employees is critical for meeting your talent needs.
There are many employee retention strategies out there, but most come with significant drawbacks for employers and provide little or no extra rewards. Take increasing salaries. To impact retention rates at a significant level, you’d need to push up salaries significantly too. This would come at a tremendous financial cost, and the higher salaries wouldn’t do anything to help your employees do their jobs better.
Source: Randstad 2015 Employer Branding Survey
Talent development, however, is an exception. While there are associated costs such as training materials and staff, in addition to providing a big retention boost (a lack of career opportunities is the No. 1 reason employees say they leave an organization), it gives employers several other rewards. A few include:
- Improved employee productivity—employees learn skills that help them with their jobs.
- Improved employee engagement—employees are less likely to feel they are in a rut, or in a dead-end job.
- Improved succession planning—employees are trained in skills that prepare them to succeed at managerial and executive roles (3.6 million babyboomers are expected to retire this year alone.)
It’s no wonder that many companies make talent development a high priority: it makes sense for them and their employees crave it. According to the SHRM survey, 69% of HR professionals said that their organizations had training budgets last year, and 89% reported that their training budgets stayed the same (50%) or increased (39%).
All this said, like most valuable strategies, talent development isn’t easy. Training is a long, complicated process that can be difficult for HR to manage, and it requires significant organizational commitment.
But many employers make talent development much more difficult than it needs to be. To learn a common-sense method that will help you succeed at talent development—benefiting your organization and your employees—read our new article, “3 Steps To Achieve Talent Development That Drives Organizational Success.”