Why employees are leaving companies
This article has originally been published on my old site https://fullstackhr.co - closed, sometime yearly 2020.
“Employees are leaving companies in record numbers, at rates we’ve not seen since the turn of the century.” – I read this article a while ago and kept thinking about it.
People leave companies for many more reasons than before (before = more than 10 years ago). Still, in my opinion, two of the less-talked-about reasons are that learning is much more accessible and that it's easier to anticipate market demand.
10 years ago, if you wanted to learn about people analytics, project management, or logistics management, the only ways to do it were:
- study this in university;
- find a written course.
For any of the above, you had to invest time and energy to prepare for admissions to be selected. This is still happening and probably will happen for a long time. But nowadays, these are not the only options to learn. Maybe they are not even the best. School systems are still stuck in the Industrial Revolution era, when their primary purpose was to prepare people to become cogs in the industry. Today we have Udemy, Skillshare, YouTube videos, learning groups on Slack, case studies, and many more sources where we can learn new skills. Instead of admission, we need the ability to assess the skills we want or need to learn – this leads to the second reason…
10 years ago, we were learning what school or others thought we should learn. Today, we can read an article from an expert in a specific industry, go on LinkedIn, search for that person, check the other 10 people LinkedIn recommends, see what they are doing, what technologies they know, what courses they've taken, and replicate it. Moreover, we can connect with these people, ask specific questions, ask for career guidance, and get a clearer perspective on the path we want to follow.
This is why I think employees are leaving companies at rates we’ve not seen before. They have access to information they didn’t have back then.