Work will find you if you are good
Helen Vandevelde explains why the best workers leave (Sunday Telegraph)

There is nothing new about the current rash of employers'  complaints about skills shortages and recruitment difficulties. Problems with recruitment and retention go back a long way.

Europe's greatest known disaster, the Black Death, wiped out one third of the population between 1349 and 1350. A contemporary complaint in England was that "a reaper was not to be hired for less than eight pence plus his meals. So crops were left to rot". Siena's city council offered tax breaks to attract inward migration.

So, as the number in work in contemporary Britain reaches an all-time high and unemployment (with the odd blip) continues to fall, it is no surprise that companies are experiencing difficulty hanging on to their best staff. This time there is something new happening. Worries about recruitment and retention are generating new thinking in corporate personnel departments - a sure sign something is afoot that goes beyond a routine cyclical upswing.

How are the fundamentals of employment relationships changing and what do these changes imply for traditional values of loyalty and commitment? Both sides of the employment equation have generated their own sets of variables.

From the individual's point of view, the end of the job for life is not news any longer; and escaping a dose of downsizing is about as rare as avoiding the plague was 650 years ago. So anyone in work is not expecting to stick around until they qualify for the gold watch.

Moreover, anyone who is in knowledge-working understands that their value in the labour market can go down as well as up. Unless they are investing in updating their skills, extending their knowledge base, developing their networks of contacts and broadening their experience, their asset rating will go the same way as turkeys left unsold on Boxing Day.

Many employees have taken their thinking towards destinations that would have been considered perverse just a few years ago. The labour market has changed in fundamental ways and people are beginning to adapt to the changed circumstances:

The fact that there is no security in working for a single company is a truism of course. It is an all or nothing relationship. But whereas the common response a few years ago was to position yourself close to the centre of the herd in the hope that the stragglers would be picked off, now there is an increasing likelihood that people will secure self-employed status and work on a number of projects for different companies simultaneously.

Not only does that enable you to spread the risk. You can also guarantee yourself a broader range of experience and build up more contacts than you would as a full-time employee.

People develop a loyalty to the team and the project, rather than the company. In the knowledge economy they trade on their reputation.

That is reflected in the commitment to delivering the whole project to a high quality. It is not the company you are rooting for. It is you.

Employees plan their income over a longer timescale. In the age of the corporate career, people could expect a gradual rise in their real terms salary as they acquired increasing levels of responsibility.

Today's employees are subject to greater fluctuations in income as their asset value varies. Ask anyone who was sorting out millennium bugs up until the end of last year.

The extent of these fluctuations have prompted some young high fliers to pursue an ambition to make their lifetime stash before they are 30 or 40, or beyond child-bearing age. With the global market for knowledge products still in its infancy, now is the time to come up with the killer application.

There is no future in handing over the intellectual crown jewels to the company out of loyalty.

Current communication technologies can be useful for individuals. At the most basic level, you can e-mail your CV to scores of companies that use search engines to grub around for matching text strings.

As visual communication of complex ideas becomes the norm, more of us will set up our own web sites with examples of our work for potential contractors to locate with new generation intelligent software. We will also develop and maintain networks of contacts all over the world.

If you are good enough, you will not need to find work. Work will find you.

The changes are affecting corporate employers at least as much. The clever companies are overturning some of their traditional assumptions about recruitment and retention:

They pay attention to the details of the staff turnover rather than the global totals. Some of the most loyal employees are the least productive. They do not bring fresh ideas because they experience work in monochrome.

Neither is it a problem in areas of skill gluts. There are always plenty more where they came from.

It is a problem where the exiting employee takes key knowledge out of the company or where it is expensive to train a new recruit.

They look beyond their reward systems for the solution. Golden handcuffs are no longer effective as a disincentive to leave a company before the end of a project because competitors can compensate with matching golden hellos.

Putting up a key worker's salary is only a short-term solution. Intelligent companies are broadening their strategies for retaining key staff.

One approach is to provide a succession of new experiences that add value to the employee. This is combined with a negotiated approach to staff development that the employee can pursue as a career investment. The employee stays as long as he calculates that his asset value is increasing sufficiently by staying with the company.

Companies develop new contract systems. Up until recently it has been the organisation that has been urging flexible contracts on its workforce. Now individuals are beginning to call the shots.

Some contract permutations offer parallel advantages. Companies might offer a training-grade post on a fixed term of two or three years. It helps the company plan its recruitment if the contracts are all timed to start (and finish) together.

The employee knows that she needs to make a sufficient career investment to inaintain her employability and can focus on achieving it in the time available.

The implied guarantee of two years' work (if genuine) is helpful to her planning too.

There are more general adaptations as well. Upheaval always generates new opportunities for those
with the imagination to grasp them - a point that was not lost on survivors of the Black Death.

One Florentine contemporary observed: "Finding themselves few and rich... men took to gluttony, taverns, gambling and unbridledlust." Now that would be the ultimate test of loyalty.