Photo Credit: Career Realism

Actual Comments of Why Employees Leave

“There would also need to be incentives for increased education, training, and licensing. As my credentials increased and improved, and my workload subsequently increased, my salary remained stagnant aside from small yearly percentage increases.”

The Solution:

ExitRight exit interview feedback can be great for identifying important things that fall through the cracks at a busy company (and which company isn’t busy?). Here, a long-term employee is sharing a frustration about lack of incentives for credential improvement.

She mentions licensing. There are many salaried jobs that have licensing requirements: nurse aide, accountant, architect, lab technicians, planners, inspectors, counselors, insurance agents and attorneys to name a few. Some of these occupations have levels of credentialing, training and certification that make employees more valuable; able to accomplish more tasks, bring in more businesses, etc. And often this credential advancement does not necessitate a promotion where salary improvements are automatically involved. That fact might explain why such an issue could become an oversight.

So the self-improvement, while it might benefit the organization, is not as a default, rewarded monetarily.

But should it be?

Such exit interview feedback might spur company policy improvements, by initiating a conversation among upper management, along the lines of:

• Does our company want to create employee incentives for professional credential advancement in the way of raises or incremental promotions?
• If so, which kind of achievements in education, training or licensing should be rewarded, and how?
• Or instead, do we look upon such advancement as an expected pursuit to retain employment?
• Or do we consider the pursuit of advanced credentialing an individual employee’s personal decision that has no bearing on their internal status?

In the ExitRight quote above, the former employee was certainly asking for management to answer these questions.

If such questions already have answers, are they inadvertently being kept a bit secret? It might be helpful to add language to the employee manual detailing the existing policy, to better manage expectations surrounding the issue and to protect employee retention—especially among those go-getters who pursue advanced licensing, training and education to make themselves better employees.

(This blog post is brought to you by HSD Metrics, an exit interview company that helps companies reduce employee turnover by providing automated reference checking, exit interviews, and by measuring employee retention. The comments from exiting employees that are featured in this blog are collected from actual exit interviews conducted using ExitRight®, HSD Metrics’ exit interviewing service. If you are interested in learning more, contact us today. Because we place the privacy of our clients at the top of our priority list; the names of all involved parties are kept completely confidential.)