ASSESSMENT OF PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEES RETENTION PRACTICES AND CHALLENGES: A CASE OF ETHIO-TELECOM

Abstract

Retaining employees whose knowledge has highly competitive value is becoming a critical challenge. Professional employees' retention in big corporation like Ethio-Telecom is wellrecognized challenge. The purpose of the study was to assess professional employees’ retention practice and challenges. The main objective of this study was to find out employee turnover is an ongoing practice in Ethio-Telecom, to identify whether they have or not a good training opportunity, career development, job security, working condition, recognition practice, and coworker’s relationship of the corporation. In order to obtain desired results, the researcher used a mixed-method approach. Questionnaires were distributed to 376 Ethio-Telecom employees and semi-structured interviews were conducted with purposively selected managers. The purposes of interviews were to know if there was actual retention practices and strategy that was implemented by the corporation. The research was a descriptive study applying quantitative and qualitative approach in which data was collected across a population through simple random and purposive sampling method and descriptive statistics were used for data analysis, which was obtained by means of questionnaires. Content analysis was used for data that was obtained by means of semistructured interviews. Hence, the study revealed that there were employee’s retention strategies available in the organization. However, most of employees of Ethio-Telecom are not satisfied with their career development, management support and recognition system. All those factors influence employees to leave the corporation. Based on the study, the researcher recommended that the organization needs to revise and employ different retention strategies, improve or modify career development programs, implement more aggressive reward and recognition system to retain its experienced and qualified employees.