Third Way: The Places We Go…Or Rather, Don’t
The strength of a state’s work force and employment retention relies heavily on the everyday experiences of those who exist within its bounds. This principle of approaching retention as a response to the person rather than the job is what helps bolster company involvement and economic growth in sectors of great importance for a given geo-political area.
This is approached by acknowledging five primary areas of employment factors that individuals analyze the most strongly before deciding whether to begin, stay at, or leave a job. These categories are as follows:
Compensation: Life is expensive. Not merely the luxuries of it, but the necessities. It is estimated that an average of three million dollars is spent from birth to death in an average individual's life. This is obviously subject to increase or decrease depending on factors such as location, diet, and transportation options to name a few, but nevertheless is a shockingly large number.
Upon turning 18, young adults are expected to select a path they anticipate to stay on and advance within until their retirement. Ignoring the incredible pressure this places on the shoulders of someone with less than two decades of lived experience, this decision also does not take into account the inevitable rises and falls experienced as one grows. Education costs, unexpected hospital trips, and even simply the act of buying a coffee just a little outside of your price range every morning can offset your budget, and effectively your life plan.
Because of this intense yet common economic sway, one must be wise when deciding whether to accept a job offer. Will this pay range allow them to make rent each month? How about groceries? And this question only becomes more complicated when observed from a familial perspective. In that case, one must consider these circumstances not merely for themselves, but for their dependents as well.
The stagnation of pay can also cause financial difficulties. A proposed hourly rate at the beginning of one's career may be more than suitable in the first two years, but as their skills change, and so too do their lives, it may become barely enough to scrape by. This is why it is dually important to consider how a given career and company may allow you to grow within their ranks.
Career: It is commonly understood that in the professional world, there is an order to things. We start out young, fresh out of school (be it high school, college, vocational or trade school) with an eagerness to learn and a set of basic skills ready to be honed and developed. We do the grunt work and the jobs no one wants in the hope that someone higher on the ladder sees our struggles and rewards us with opportunities of advancement. This is a sort of “waiting to be discovered” mindset.
No one wants to be the intern fetching coffee and scheduling appointments for the rest of their life. We all hope to learn from our difficult days and grow away from them. The importance of career advancement opportunities cannot be overshadowed. It offers motivation, a morale boost, and helps to foster ambition within individuals.
The last three principles are those of connection, culture, and communication. When discussing the reasons why individuals choose to stay or leave a given area, these three factors fall more to the emotional side and less to the logistical, thus they sway our decisions more strongly by subconscious effect.
As human beings, we fear change and crave safety. We search for places and people that feel like “home” to us. This is both a beautiful facet of humanity and simultaneously its crux. In order to grow, we must experience people, places, and situations unfamiliar to ourselves. And we must make ourselves available to these opportunities for growth.
Sometimes this fear manifests itself in the form of internalized bias and a perceived ignorance towards the unknown. This can be understood to be a large reason why individuals may choose not to move far beyond their home states. The environment one grows up in shapes the person they become. Their social class, education level, religion, family unit, and friends all contribute to their personality like a patchwork of identities. Particularly in terms of political identities. Those who grew up in a smaller town with a largely conservative outlook, likely have not been exposed to the same breadth of people as someone who grew up in a big city with a more liberal environment. This difference of circumstance can result in a jarring change of scenery if all you've ever known is your quiet corner of the world and a specific set of ideals that have surrounded you since infancy.
The reasons why one may choose to stay within the bounds of their home state or neighboring states can and are affected by more factors than can be adequately analyzed in such a finite amount of time. But most importantly, we must acknowledge the emotional ways in which our individual bias’ dictate our ambitions within the job market and thus affect the retention of the sector we wish to advance into. Growth happens outside of our comfort zones. It happens when we brave the unknown and dare to explore that which is unfamiliar to us.