Greetings

I am looking for statistics that correlate training/development to job satisfaction and job retention. Or more importantly an analysis of the weight and impact of the multiple variables that are involved in job satisfaction and job retention. thanks

Are you interested in job performance?

Thanks,

i am looking for high level stats, if possible of the relationship of training, development and thus motivation as it relates to retaining people on staff. Or another tack - At what level does training empower people to stay in their job.

Opp-

Not sure that this will answer your question, but I will give it a shot. At a previous company I worked for we were working on lowering voluntary turnover. According to our exit strategy data, "lack of development opporunities" and "lack of career path" were 2 of the top reasons given for employees leaving.
We focused our efforts on development opportunities and creating career paths and cut turnover in half within 2 years. Very few voluntary exits were attributed to "lack of career/development opportunities".

The answer to your question is hard to determine because it depends on why employees are dissatisfied or leaving int the first place.

My suggestion would be to do exit interviews or surveys with a percentage of those volunteering leaving the business. Ask them what factors caused their exit (and given them a list of 10 factors with the ability to add others). Have them assign a percentage to each number (so they could say "poor wages--100%" or "poor wages-50%, no advancement 40%, lack of training--10%" or whatever).

I bet what you'll find is that training doesn't make the top 5 or maybe not even the top 10. But that doesn't matter. You average out the scores you got. If you can argue that lack of development opportunities/training was a major factor in 15% of all exits, than you figure out what the cost is to acquire and train a new employee. Then you've got your ROI for training. And unlike a generic number taken from another company (which might have been in better times when turnover was higher), this will be specific to your business.