In this article, I’d like to discuss the alarming rate at which engineering professionals are leaving their firms today. This will continue for some time, but I want to share an image and analogy to help you think through how you can prevent your professionals from “jumping ship.”
After talking with some clients recently, I sketched out the cartoon (Figure 1) above, which provides an analogy to what many of our clients are experiencing today.
Imagine your company as a boat that is moving fast toward its destination of GROWTH. The bigger the boat gets, the more people you need to help keep it moving at the same rate. If you are like most of our clients, you are facing two big problems:
- You are struggling to find more people to come on to your boat for a variety of reasons, one of them being that there are many other boats in the ocean that you are competing with.
- Secondly, some of your people are jumping ship or leaving your boat for what they perceive to be a better one. Either they are looking for a better boat, or they are just burned out because you can’t find more people to come on your boat and help them.
Some firms acquire other firms to try to solve these problems, but all that does is bring more busy people onto the boat. They can’t help your existing employees. The only way to avoid these two problems and keep your boat moving toward your destination is to build a better boat!
How to Build a Better Boat
In a recent survey of over 700 engineering professionals on LinkedIn, 51% chose career growth opportunities as the most important thing to them, above high salary and bonus, great benefits, and work from home flexibility. Do you realize what this means?
This is how you can build a better boat…
[Read more…] about Proven Engineer Retention Strategies for 2024
