Promotion VS Development

If you have to choose between an opportunity for promotion and advancement or training and development, what would be your choice? It seems most employees have chosen promotion and advancement over training and development and according to Quantum Workplace, there are some interesting relationship between age, tenure in the company and the employee's choice. Assuming the relationship is true, how can companies utilize this finding in their policies and management strategy?

If the findings are true, perhaps companies should look into the age of an employee and the impact of the employee's promotion. Would shortening the time to be promoted increases motivation and retention rate for younger employees in the company? Maybe companies need to create new intermediate job titles between two current positions to do so. Companies can also based on the findings to refine their intensity and extensivity of their training and development programme for certain age group and tenure in the company. Does that help to keep your employees?

Apparently, more work has to be done to understand how age and tenure of an employee influence our motivational factors and behaviors to devise appropriate policy to have an impact but let's try and see what we can draw from these findings. The following are merely assumptions and yet to be proven, if there are other studies that support my stand or show otherwise, please let me know.

I see age as an time indication of personal experience shaping our values in the way we do things, our beliefs in consequences to our actions, the character of the type of person we want to be and our attitude influencing our behavior. Time itself does not change us but as we grow, our ability to learn and internalize our experience in seek of happiness changes the way we think. Therefore, perhaps it is due to our young state of mind, and the constant reminder of education to get a rewarding job with good compensation and benefits, we desire for recognition, seeking immediate returns for our efforts. We pursue career advancement and focused our efforts in seek of these desires.

These desires never left us but as we age, we start to develop a different state of mind where personal growth and job satisfaction motivates more than recognition and immediate returns. In this case, I am assuming that career success and compensation and benefits corresponds proportionately to age, the older you are, the more well-off you become and that makes you less sensitive to extrinsic motivations. Therefore, there is a shift of preference from promotion and advancement to training and development along with the age of the respondents.

If that is the case, how are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations working us? What is the impact of the different motivations to different groups of employees? Is it true that extrinsic motivations has an increasingly diminishing impact on employees where paying twice the salary will not double the employee's motivation and that the increase in the employee's motivation decreases as the pay increases then what would be the optimal amount to pay? Besides that, how can we utilize intrinsic motivations which are arguably more influential than extrinsic motivations to motivate employees?

Well, I have many questions. But first, promotion or development? I choose training and development. How about you?