BY SUHAIL MASRI
retaining talent
COLUMN - Executive Talk
Retaining and engaging top talent should be a top priority for all organizations. Finding and keeping those star employees at every level is key to the success of the entire organization, and not something anyone can afford to ignore. Lack of training, development and growth is one of the primary reasons your best talent might walk out the door on you sooner than you think.
Competitive advantage and business results nowadays depend more than ever on recruiting, engaging and retaining top talent – people who are highly effective at both leadership and technical skills. But how do leaders make that happen?
In this article, the experts at Bayt.com, the Middle East’s leading job site, explore the importance of training and development in retaining and engaging top talent:
1. Lack of training is a reason for employee turnover
Today, employees don’t stay with their companies for too long. The Bayt.com ‘Employee Retention in the MENA Workplace’ poll, February 2013, has revealed that the majority of employees in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region stay no longer than five years in a job before moving on, while more than half claim they would like to leave their jobs immediately.
Providing a more competitive salary is considered the most important factor in employee retention by 26.6% of respondents, followed by performance recognition (17.7%), and good manager-employee relationships (17.6%). 14.4% also state that good training and development opportunities would be a reason for them to stay with their employer.
Employees tend to put more effort into their jobs when they feel valuable to their company. If you invest time and money in them and cater to their professional needs, your employees will be more likely to invest right back in their jobs, thereby producing more and committing to their jobs even more.
2. Employees attach importance to training
7 in 10 professionals want to work for a company that has career growth prospects, encourages new ideas and provides training opportunities, as revealed in the Bayt.com ‘What Makes a Company an Attractive Place to Work?’ poll, February 2014. In fact, top talent expects to be continuously trained. They expect to be given challenging assignments that stretch them to the next level.
They want to come to work to be stimulated, pushed to excel and encouraged to do their very best.
20 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST MARCH 2015
through training