Young Information Technology (IT) professionals benefit from attrition in firms as it creates room to bring in new talents, ideas, and innovation into the system. But could they also cause high attrition (or high employee turnover) in the industry?
In a way, yes. The IT industry is defined by very high demand and stiff competition which also leads to a high turnover of personnel.
Young IT professionals do not intend to work long term and would sooner form their own business.
In 2017, software had the highest job turnover rate of any sector at thirteen and two-tenths percent (13.2%).
Within software, the roles of a user experience designer, data analyst, and embedded software engineer have the highest turnover rates.
Young IT professionals tend to favor jobs that are fun, intellectually stimulating, beneficial to society or lucrative. The downside is when attrition involves highly skilled personnel, the company loses.
Several positions attractive to young IT professionals
For large enterprises, employee attrition is often viewed as an unavoidable cost of doing business.
IT companies are making a tremendous effort to prevent young digital technology professionals from taking up senior-level positions.
The high staff turnover rate in the industry has created several positions attractive to young professionals, and other high performers in the field.
One company launched a program for 25% of its top performers at the junior level to play lead roles within five years of joining.
Additionally, five (5) % of the top employees are given topnotch training for their current roles.
Giving these incentives hopefully could stem replacement costs and lost time in finding the next best candidate although retention does not necessarily involve money as some professionals move out for career growth.
Circumventing high attritions
To curb this high attrition rate in the industry, software companies have mapped out means to achieve this purpose.
On their list are salary increase, career growth, and development, as well as providing bonuses and promotion, all directed to increase talent retention.
For all top performers, a salary hike of thirty (30) to forty (40) percent is offered even during the training cycle.
Debasmita Das, principal – careers and hi-tech industry lead at a consulting firm, explained how the increase in skills usually results in high staff turnover rates.
Some tech companies reported the same high attrition news which happens across the industry.
Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant experienced high staff turnover rate between April-June. The tech companies reported attrition rates of 22.4 percent,17.6 percent, and 24 percent respectively.
Each of these companies has devised staff retention strategies ranging from increasing staff salaries, providing training, and giving retention awards to employees.
A Cognizant representative described the retention strategy thus:
Our goal is to accelerate revenue and margin growth, while ensuring a performance culture built on meritocracy. We have also executed a retention program for our most talented leaders at the director level.
When top-performing employees who are responsible for driving sales and increasing revenue become demotivated and start looking for the exit, this is known as negative attrition, and it is an implication of a larger, more serious problem within an organization.
