Today’s average employee stays at the job a mere 1.5 years, according to recent Department of Labor statistic. Are managers doing that bad a job of engaging and retaining their people? Is this rate of turnover simply the new norm? Is it due to an increase in carer dissatisfaction?

There are hundreds of books about the causes of career dissatisfaction, yet a whopping 89% of managers still think low pay is the reason most employees quit. The facts are hidden from the people who need them most. In reality, 88% of voluntary employee turnovers are the result of something other than money, according to data from the Saratoga Institute.

There are plenty of suggestions as to why employees feel discontent and then quit. It’s a lack of coaching and feedback. The workplace and job weren’t what the employee expected. There aren’t enough advancement opportunities. Workers don’t feel valued. There’s too much stress. These can all be a part of dissatisfaction, but they do not help us find the solution to the problem.

The Solution

Managers and employees aren’t trained to recognize the real causes of career dissatisfaction or satisfaction. It can be hard to see the simple fact that the reason for turnover is that the wrong people are being hired in the first place. Managers look for people with the skills that make them right for the job, when what is actually most important is finding workers with the innate abilities that make them suitable for the job.

In other words, if the job requires climbing trees, you need to hire a monkey, not a goose. You can train the goose all you want, but the monkey is going to do a better and faster job every time. Not only that, but the monkey will love the job and therefore stay. The goose will definitely have some career dissatisfaction. But how do you find who’s a monkey and who’s a goose? It all comes down to ability-based career profiling.

Everyone has abilities that they were born with. The secret of ability-based career profiling is matching those abilities with the job that makes the most out of them. An abilities test takes the innate abilities of a person and creates a list of most suitable jobs. Oftentimes, these tests find subtle differences that turn into major outcomes.

For example, two people may have the innate ability to be good engineers, but only one of them is a generalist and extrovert. If you promote the wrong one, you may be removing your best engineer from the job and putting them in a position where they feel uncomfortable and incompetent. Choosing the right candidate, however, can take a merely competent engineer into a career where they really excel. This doesn’t mean one is objectively better than the other; they simply have a different array of natural talents that make them more fit for certain jobs. If a manager (and the employee) understand this, great work will be done efficiently, effectively, and produce career happiness!

Abilities Tests

Ability-based career profiling goes way beyond asking employees what they like to do. That’s simply a survey on which a person could lie or give an inaccurate answer. The great thing about ability-based career profiles is that they don’t lie. Through these tests, an employee’s true talents come out.

Don’t ignore the single most important factor in employee job satisfaction. Good employers want to build a great talent pool, and they know it all begins with selecting the right person in the first place. You can try to train the goose to climb, or you can let ability testing find the monkey.

Are you feeling the affects of career dissatisfaction? If you want to find out which career will allow you to excel and be happy, then check out our ability-based career tests. Finally, for questions or comments, feel free to get in touch with The Career Profiler!