Almost a quarter of workers are actively planning to change employers in the next few months, a report in the Guardian claimed, as part of a “great resignation” prompted by a high number of vacancies and re-examination of work life balance by individuals.
‘A survey of 6,000 workers by the recruitment firm Randstad UK found that 69% of them were feeling confident about moving to a new role in the next few months, with 24% planning a change within three to six months. That figure would normally be around 11%’
It has warned that such a move will have considerable cost implications for employers – as much as £25,000 for each worker – and said it has been advising clients to start looking at whether they needed to improve pay and other conditions to help them retain their best staff.
The shortage of skilled labour coupled with the movement of labour leads companies to consider sign on bonuses and higher pay. But there are other ways to retain and attract staff such as lowering the entrance requirement for roles and relying on training to impart the skills, and/or using training and upskilling as a positive employment benefit to attract staff. So will this ‘great resignation’ lead to upswing in business for trainers?
The Economist reports that ‘the share of job postings that offer training was more than 30% higher than January 2020.’ And that ‘new providers of training are proliferating with everyone from university run ‘boot-camps’ to short term training specialists and the big employers themselves.
Financial services provider, Allianz is encouraging all employees to ‘devote an hour of work time per week to take one of more than 10,000 courses from their on-line system……….. while Siemens have just announced the spending of 175million euro a year on training and retraining its workers in Germany and a similar amount for the other European employees – all to help retain staff’ (Economist)
The question of course is whether this current upswing is a temporary phenomenon. Back to the Guardian article:
‘Victoria Short, CEO at Randstad UK, said some of those looking for new jobs were workers who during the pandemic had stayed in roles they were unhappy with.
She said: “Another factor is burnout. Some teams have been running too hot for too long. The pandemic has changed how some people think about life, work, and what they want out of both. It’s made people step back and rethink their lives. Covid has reminded them that life is too short.”
Workers currently employed in construction, tech and logistics were all confident they would find new opportunities, with workers in manufacturing being the most confident.
Randstad warned the mass resignations will come at considerable cost to the UK’s private sector. Research carried out by Oxford Economics found that it takes recently hired professional workers 28 weeks to reach optimum productivity – which has an attached cost of £25,200 per employee, it said.
Short added: “The Great Resignation is going to be tricky for those industries that can move workers around. It is going to be very difficult indeed for industries where employees are trying to get out altogether.
A shortage of workers in some industries has led companies to offer signing on bonuses of up to £10,000 to attract recruits, although some surveys have suggested many do not plan to increase wages.’
So there is a huge opportunity right now. Although we would argue though that retention of employees via training has always been major factor. Even before the pandemic the consultant Go2HR was stating :
‘that 40 per cent of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year. They cite the lack of skills training and development as the principal reason for moving on’
Whether short term or long term this is good news for the training industry which has been through a pretty interesting couple of years.
The Economist Feb 5th – pp58-59
https://www.go2hr.ca/training-development/employee-training-is-worth-the-investment