If you’re operating a small-to-midsized business (SMB), then you’ve no doubt been coming across Great Resignation statistics—such as 72% of your employees are currently considering a job switch. And those numbers are especially pertinent to your IT staff, since their skills are in such high demand just now.
Since you already know IT workers are job-hopping, you’ll want to know why—and what can you do about it. If you can turn your business into what an IT pro or any employee is looking for, not only are your current staffers less likely to leave, but it’ll also be easier to attract new talent to fill any existing open positions. Fortunately, a recent study by TalentLMS (in conjunction with Workable) and a similar study from FlexJobs show the same trend data for why IT pros are leaving and what they’re looking for in a new employer. The TalentLMS study surveyed 1,200 US technology workers, while the FlexJobs study queried a more general swath of 2,100 US employees currently working remotely.
In the TalentLMS survey, 41% of those surveyed said it was because of limited career progression. And though only 30% said it was a reason to leave the job, fully 58% of TalentLMS’ IT pro respondents said they had suffered or were suffering from job burnout. Finally, three-quarters said they were leaving in part because their employer seemed more interested in attracting new talent than in developing current staff.
The FlexJobs survey had nearly the same figures, with 56% of its respondents saying they had experienced or were currently experiencing burnout. Also in that study, almost 40% of respondents said they thought their mental health was worse now than it was in early 2020.
Both surveys cited few opportunities to learn as a related trend. Around 32% of TalentLMS respondents said they felt a lack of learning opportunities was sufficient reason to quit; on the FlexJobs side, nine out of 10 said they’d been pursuing some kind of online learning curriculum to build up their current skills, usually as a precursor to seeking new employment.
There’s More to It Than Salary
When the TalentLMS survey asked its respondents what they were looking for in a new job, the results were mixed. As you’d expect, the most popular response, at 76%, related to higher compensation. But surprisingly, the next most popular response was to improve learning and skill-development opportunities, which came in at 58%. That was slightly higher than even the number of respondents citing hybrid and remote work benefits (56%). Another 49% added opportunities for career growth.
Break those numbers down, and it seems that aside from getting paid more, IT professionals (and other types of workers) are looking for ways to improve their skills and then use them to move along a career path. So if you want employees to see your company as a long-term home rather than just a short stop between job hops, you need to think about making a commitment to them, too.
Make sure they know you see them as a long-term investment and not just a one-skill solution to a single-slot job. If they feel they’ve hit their career ceiling as soon as they’ve walked in the door, it won’t be long before you watch them walk out again, especially in this job market.
Evaluating your learning resources is a great place to start, since remote-learning technology has never been easier or cheaper to use. Most of your employees are probably already engaged in it anyway, according to the FlexJobs survey, which reported that over half of its respondents took an online professional course during the pandemic. Forty-one percent said they attended a virtual professional development event in that time, and 28% said they’d studied for or earned a new certification.
With roughly half your technology staff already engaged in online learning using third-party providers, it only makes sense to steer that enthusiasm back in-house. Managers and human resource (HR) pros should sit down and list the kinds of skills the company needs and where it needs them. From there, even small businesses will find it fairly easy to develop learning tracks to meet those knowledge needs using courses provided through low-cost online training resources such as Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Udemy.
What business owners usually worry about is that paying for employees to learn new skills might also mean paying them to get a job somewhere else. For IT professionals, for example, providing them with learning resources can lead directly to one of the top IT certifications, which could certainly make them more attractive to another employer.
But if that’s your fear, then just look at the TalentLMS and FlexJobs survey data: You’re worried about employees looking to leave when the numbers show that more than 70% of them are already looking. That damage is done, so you’re no longer trying to avoid it—you’ve got to make it stop. To do that, you need to make employees feel safer and fairly valued.
Three Steps to Employee Retention
That sounds like a tall order, but fortunately, the survey data shows you should be able to make a big dent in three (fairly) short steps.
1. Hire careers, not heads. Every employer says they’re looking to hire “top talent.” Employees and applicants have heard that ad nauseam, so don’t go there. According to TalentLMS, 49% of the best people already have a career path in mind. That means they’ll either get it from you or they’ll get it by job-hopping.
Make sure they know they can get it from you by setting aside some time to actually build out some of those career paths. In your IT department, for example, don’t think in terms of just hiring a day-to-day cloud-service administrator. Sit down with your CIO or senior IT manager and think about where such an employee might go: Straight up into a managerial slot, or perhaps sideways to another technology specialization such as cloud security or service-architecture design? Do you need those skills, or should you encourage others?
The plan shouldn’t be set in stone, but having a detailed answer ready when an applicant or employee asks the question shows them your company is paying attention to their career ambitions. Once the employee expresses interest, managers and mentors can work with them to develop tailored career tracks that benefit both sides. Now you’ve got a motivated employee receiving personalized career attention that they know they’ll have difficulty getting elsewhere.
2. Make learning a benefit, not a burden. Once you’ve built those career paths, it only makes sense to support employees interested in pursuing them. Follow-through is paramount—but again, you should push yourself beyond the bare minimum. Offering a free bundle of Udemy courses so an employee can pass a certification exam, for instance, is a small and easy step in the right direction. But a larger, better step is tying that certification directly to a promotion or a lateral job slot requiring new skills.
Mapping this out ahead of time might be a little difficult for managers, but not only does it make employees happier, it also makes them less likely to leave. And if you can make this plain to folks applying for new jobs, both TalentLMS and FlexJobs’ survey numbers indicate it should be a huge draw.
3. Plan to pay more. Yeah, you thought I forgot about this one, didn’t you? But the 76% of TalentLMS survey respondents who said they were leaving for higher compensation means you’re going to have to bite the bullet here. It’s not fun, but then again, you’ll need to do it next year anyway, to stay competitive from a hiring standpoint: Salary.com recently conducted a National Salary Budget Survey that showed that over 40% of businesses were planning higher salary increases in 2022 than they had in 2021.
Salary.com says this represents the first real upshift in merit increases they’ve seen in 10 years. The survey also showed that 12% of companies were planning increases between 4% and 5%, while last year only around 7% of businesses were increasing by that amount.
Fortunately, you’ve got more options than simply tossing out more cash. Aside from increasing salaries, employers next year are also expected to offer new perks and benefits in addition to or in place of monetary increases. Tuition reimbursements, the free online learning opportunities mentioned above, performance bonuses, new health benefits for mental well-being and wellness, and flexible hybrid work schedules are all expected to be part of employee compensation packages in 2022.
