Flexibility key for early career employee satisfaction and retention

Early career employees across the United States are entering a work environment different from the one their parents and grandparents entered. The days of staying with one company for an entire career are over. In fact, based on a survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), only a quarter of workers in their mid-thirties are with the same employer they had at the beginning of their career 10 years earlier. With the rate of technological development across all industries, many employees joining the workforce today will retire from jobs that do not yet exist.

Employees in this quickly evolving professional world move between jobs every 4.4 years (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020), a number that drops to 2.3 years for high performers in their early-thirties (Hamori et al., 2012). When surveyed about the reasons for job changes, a lack of career growth was the second most common reason for leaving a job. Additionally, a third of employees said they quit because they were not learning new skills (Akhtar, 2019). Maintaining flexibility as both an employer and employee is key to mitigating these concerns about career growth opportunities and skill development, which increases employee satisfaction and retention.

Take Advantage of Opportunities Early On

Oftentimes, the greatest growth curve for a professional is at the beginning of a career when experiences come into play and begin to narrow down interests and passions.

Early career employees should focus on taking advantage of opportunities within their function and elsewhere in the company in preparation of a potential pivot as they evolve professionally.

If job shadowing and cross-training are available, employees should sign up to participate. If they are not, an excited young employee would be a great advocate for suggesting to management that they should add such a development program. It can seem overwhelming to attempt to cover a broader skill set early in a career, but the benefits are twofold. First, it is important for employees to find out what aspects of the industry they like and dislike early in their career, before limited experiences pigeon-hole them into a specific job. Secondly, if the employee’s professional interests are not developing synergistically with their current position, they will have the skill set and network connections to make a horizontal move into a more suitable role.

As a manager, it is especially important to stay flexible with early career employees. After investing time and money to train new employees for a specific role, it can seem counter-intuitive to give them the opportunity to spend time learning a different job. In reality, cross-training for early career employees is a positive for both the employee and employer. In addition to decreasing day-to-day monotony and increasing employee adaptability, cross-training can improve company culture. Gaining firsthand experience of co-workers’ responsibilities builds team camaraderie and increases employee adaptability during peak times. Additionally, participating in a process from beginning to end helps employees understand how they fit into the organization’s overall goals. Formalization of an interdisciplinary training program can be tailored to fit an organization’s mission and can be a great selling point when recruiting top young talent. One example of a company-supported program is “3 × 3 cross-training” for which an organization commits to training every employee to be proficient in three different jobs and has three employees trained to step into each role (DeLong, 2015).