3 Tips for Improving Employee Retention

Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities business leaders have. Let’s dive into the role employee training plays in retaining your employees.

Employee Retention from Training

In their 2018 Workforce Learning survey, LinkedIn found that the #1 challenge for talent development is getting employees to make time for learning and training.

This is very frustrating for business leaders, especially when the same employees reported that 94% of them would stay longer at a company if they perceived that the company was investing in their career.

This tells us that employee training directly affects employee retention, but it also tells us that training employees is a difficult task for both employee and leader.

How can you make this happen?

1. 68% of employees prefer to learn at work.
   • We have to make it convenient for our team members to engage in learning opportunities as part of their workday.
2. 58% of employees prefer to learn at their own pace.
   • Just like our team members have diversity in their thinking styles and communication styles, they are likely to have different speeds in learning. We risk expending a lot of effort on training if we don’t accommodate learning and absorption rates.
3. 49% of employees prefer to learn at the point of need.
   • What this means is that individuals want to learn a skill when it is needed and they can apply it. If we provide training for something that is not needed now, then we run the risk of learning decay, which means re-training in the future.
   • Your investment in the training and development of your employees is essential. I love a quote that I’ve seen as a meme where a CFO asks a CEO, “What happens if we train our people and they leave,” and the CEO answers, “What happens if we don’t and they stay?’

Recommended Reads: SHRM published an article where the author argues that “training is a bridge that can lead to employee satisfaction and a higher retention rate for your company.”

Now that we have established training as an important tool for employee retention, I’d love to know about your organization.

How do you decide the training to invest in every year?

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.