Retention practices for engineering and technical professionals in an Australian public agency

Abstract

Retaining employees with core business skills is a key human resources (HR) activity. This article examines retention of engineering and technical (E&T) professionals in an Australian public service agency by collecting data from 670 E&T professionals to compare attraction, retention and turnover intention by age and occupation. It was hypothesised that the influencers would vary by age, in line with the research on generational differences and employment patterns (Chaminade 2005; Kyles 2005). This hypothesis was largely supported. It has also been suggested that intention to leave is influenced by job opportunity (Hwang and Kuo 2006) and we thus sought to examine the influencers for turnover intention for the differing occupations in the E&T group surveyed. There were no significant differences by occupation, except for location, although this may be because occupational groups were aggregated due to the small numbers in some occupations. The current findings address the call for evidence-based data on the influencers for attraction, retention and turnover intention (Allen, Bryant and Vardaman 2010), and suggests that retention strategies need to take into account generational differences.