One simple management fact: Staff move on. There are many reasons this happens, not least of which is the lack of additional opportunity to progress and learn.
Given this state of affairs, we need to develop means for handling the fact that staff move on. Typically that focuses everyone on recruitment of suitable replacements that:
- Already possess the appropriate technical skills
- Already have the relevant experience
- Already have the relevant mindset
The key word there is already. It presents us with a number of problems:
- An equivalently skilled individual will almost certainly move on themselves, because they’ll soon figure out there’s no more opportunity.
- There are only so many suitably skilled people available.
- Unless we have a bottomless pit of money, we can only access some fraction of the overall pool of available people.
- Someone who has the mindset may not yet have developed the skills.
All these factors limit our ability to find the perfect replacement. It follows that we should widen the net a little, look for those that could be what we need with a little training. Training is likely to be a mixture of courses and on the job, with the latter dominating as what is learnt in the classroom must be put into real practice to bring progress and value.
Adopting such an approach brings many benefits including a maintained quality of work and a level of loyalty which translates into good staff retention which in turn reduces the amount of recruitment we must do. Cool, huh?
One last fact: Too many organisations make no serious effort at training, expecting the right people to just walk through their doors. They want someone else to take the burden e.g. universities and give nothing back in return. Such selfishness ultimately leaves them short of the skills they desire incurring costs.
Employment is give and take, give some training and development and you’ll take the rewards.
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