The role of training and development in attracting and retaining professional services employees

While retaining highly qualified employees is an imperative, very little service research has analyzed the role of training in retaining highly qualified employees. The literature on retaining service workers is dominated by studies on retaining less qualified frontline employees. However, knowledge-intense service firms require context-specific experienced know-how. In fast-paced services such as IT, training and development are crucial owing to the vicissitude of knowledge in this domain. In addition, highly qualified service employees, and especially members of Generation Y, expect their employers to care for their employability. We therefore analyze to what extent training helps or hinders retaining highly qualified service workers.

We develop a structural equation model relating training and development as a multidimensional construct to turnover intentions. Thus, we operationalize the training construct in the sub dimensions of perceived availability, perceived effectiveness, perceived career benefits and perceived organizational support for taking part in training activities.

To further unlock the “black box” and to analyze as to how training helps or hinders retention, we included mediated effects via employee commitment and support by the employer. Drawing on the theory of social exchange, we hypothesize indirect effects of training on retention, mediated by commitment, perceived organizational support and satisfaction. We validate the model on a sample of 423 highly qualified employees in IT-related services. Results suggest that employees indeed value firms’ investments into training and development and thus exhibit stronger commitment, feel more supported by their organization and have lower turnover intentions.

Our research implicates that training offers may effectively lower turnover intentions of highly qualified service employees. Thus, training offers have to be openly communicated to make employees aware of the firm’s offers at all. Furthermore, our study shows that employees have to perceive trainings as effective in order to lower their turnover intentions challenging HR departments to attentively select trainings in order to fulfill employees’ requirements in terms of effectiveness.

Besides that, we additionally conducted a scenario-based field experiment among master students of IT and young professionals in this industry. We found, that the participants have a clear preference for jobs and employers offering ample training and development opportunities.

We aim at expanding the scope of this research by testing the model in different industries. At the moment, we are collecting data in the hospitality industry, however, aim at testing the model in further different service industries.