As you greet your colleagues back to work, consider this: What if they all thought about changing employers this summer. We assume many of them did. As usual, we have a few ideas we think could help HR and employers in these times of brightening economic prospects.
Look at the curve below. We call it the smiling mouth. This is what it looks like in most companies, most lines of business and most countries. The old advice to career oriented young people to change jobs every five years looks quite good. Changing keeps that critical learning process active.
But what would it mean to your organization if everybody changed jobs every two years? It would spell disaster, right? You would loose people just as they have learned the ropes.
Or, let’s imagine only the people that care about learning leave. That leaves you with the people that do not value learning. That is one sinister interpretation of the upward trend that generally starts after five or six years: The expectation of learning new things has fallen. What will that do to your level of innovation?
On the other side: the best years often come after year five. These people have strong networks and many friends in the organization. A new employer would probably up their learning curve in the short term, but it may take a decade for the new employer to match the every day working quality they have now.
My point is this: Consider the development curve of people that have been with your company for a number of years. These people know how things work. That means they probably know what they should develop in order to deliver even more.
There is a wide spread assumption that learning is not critical beyond a certain age or a certain tenure. Our analyses have proven that assumption completely wrong. Development is a strong engagement driver among these people
Give it to them.