Retaining the learning professional: A survival study on workplace learning in professional service firms
Lowering professional turnover is of paramount importance for professional service firms, as with each professional, crucial proprietary knowledge leaves the firm. Based on the need to retain this crucial knowledge in the firm, this study explores whether factors that drive learning at work also mitigate professionals' turnover behavior. Building on insights from both workplace learning and turnover research, this study follows 96 professional auditors across a period of 5”‰years to determine how drivers for workplace learning at the organizational, the social interaction, and the individual level relate to turnover behavior.
Authors
Wim Gijselaers is full professor in educational research, in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on educational innovation in higher education, social determinants of team cognition and team performance, and judgment and decision making in management and accounting. His educational development work focused on the further development of Problem-Based Learning within Business Education. Next to teaching in the award-winning Master program Management of Learning, he teaches as visiting professor at the University of Bern (Switzerland) in a post-graduate program for Health Care Professionals. Wim is member of advisory boards of universities in Germany and Switzerland, and serves as chief-editor of the Springer Book Series Innovation and Change in Professional Education. Next, he is affiliated with the consulting firm Learning Miles (based in Helsinki). In this role he has presented workshops for Scandinavian-based companies on topics of Innovation and Change. He was co-founder and chair of the EDINEB network in the Nineties. Next, he was the founding editor of the Springer Book Series Educational Innovation in Economics and Business. He served positions as Program Director of International Business, and Associated Dean of Education. Currently he is chair of the department of Educational Research and Development, at the School of Business and Economics (Maastricht University). Several of his PhD’s received awards for their PhD Thesis, or papers presented at meetings of the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, and the EARLI Special Interest Group 14 “Learning and Professional Development”. Together with Professor Ann Vanstraelen he coordinates the GSBE research project "Culture, Ethics, and Leadership": https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/institutes/gsbe/gsbe-research.