How to Retain Your Employees With Training: Retention Stage

20% of an employee’s annual salary will be spent to find, recruit, and train their replacement. That cost is why investing in an employee retention strategy can pay off big for organizations.

In our free eBook, Retain Your Employees: 6 Key Stages to Include Training, we show you how offering training opportunities at every stage of the employee life cycle can improve retention.

The Employee Life Cycle

The employee life cycle is an organized way to look at the different stages an employee follows within your organization.

Attraction > Recruitment > Onboarding > Development > Retention > Separation

Most employers focus their training efforts in the Onboarding and Development areas. In previous blogs, we talked about Attraction, Recruitment, Onboarding, and Development.

Today we’re focusing on the Retention stage. This stage is, of course, the ultimate goal.

The Retention Stage

Definition: The Retention stage, which could run concurrent with the development stage, is where the employee stays with an organization because they feel support and appreciation from the employer. They see themselves achieving their goals with the employer’s help.

Employees stay with an organization for a variety of reasons, which could include the following:

• Being recognized for the work they’re doing
• Continued growth and progression in a desired career path through training opportunities
• Feeling a sense of belonging at work
• Fair compensation and benefits
• And receiving the training they wanted!

Consistent training and seeing progression in an organization are key to employee retention. It shows them they’re valued and play a critical role to the success of the group.

The last thing you want is to have an employee feel they’re stagnating in their career and start looking to exit stage left.

Here are some ways you can make sure your training programs support employee retention:

• If you already have a program in place, train your managers and supervisors to follow up regularly on employee progress.
• If you have a program in place, but don’t want it to get stale, continue to expand your training offering so you can provide more opportunities for your employees.
• Make sure the program includes not only skills to help the employee do their current position, but also courses that will help groom them to move up in the organization.
• If you have a program, but aren’t sure how well it’s being received, survey employees for what is working in your training, and where they would like to see improvements.
• If your program is working and you are looking to reward employees with a training perk, send them to relevant conferences and certification courses to continue to learn new skills.

Need help putting a training program in place?

Check out all the off-the-shelf courses in our library. These are ready for immediate delivery using any learning management system. If you don’t have a learning management system yet, we’d love to give you a demo of Knowledgelink LMS.

Want more employee retention tips? Download our free eBook, Retain Your Employees: 6 Key Stages to Include Training.