What started as a blog and a creative outlet turned into a full-time consultant business for Kamber Parker, founder of YoPro Know.
YoPro Know is a consultancy firm that teaches businesses how to attract and retain young professional talent. Parker has spent the last four years interviewing more than 550 young professionals on what drives them to remain at or leave a job, and businesses hire her to share that knowledge with them. They want to be the former, not the latter.
“All the data I’ve collected, I came up with five key factors of why young people stay or leave. I interview the young professionals and the experienced professionals in the office and look for the main areas that they might need help in,” Parker said. “One of the key five factors I mentioned is expectation. That’s a huge one I see as a direct correlation to people leaving. The job isn’t what they expected or were promised [during the interview], so what do young people do? They go on LinkedIn and find the next job in 10 minutes.”
Parker focuses on workers aged 21 through 39, which is an important range to keep happy; the UPCEA Center for Research and Strategy determined in 2019 that by 2030, Millennials and Gen Z will make up two-thirds of the workforce.
Through her consulting process, Parker finds gaps her client needs to fill to retain their young professional employees and then spends several months working with them to patch those gaps. She isn’t trying to replace any company’s human resources department — YoPro Know, she said, is meant as a complement to HR. She’ll be the first to tell you she’s an expert in young professionals, not all generations.
Along with expectation, the other key factors that push young professionals to stay or to go are communication, education, professional development and culture. When looking at communication, how do staff communicate inter-generationally? Do senior employees respect younger employees? How about with direct reports; how is communication there? In terms of education, does the company give the employees the training they need to excel? If not, Parker noted that young professional employees might feel unsupported in their job, which would make them more likely to leave.
“It’s this cycle,” she said. “Companies don’t want to spend that much on training, because people are leaving. This is the Great Resignation, so companies are like, ‘Why would we spend all this time?’ But people aren’t feeling educated on what they’re doing… That’s what I feel like my mission is, to fix that. I do believe it’s possible, but we need to get past the idea that young people are just job hopping. A lot of what I do is just bridge the gap. Yes, I’m the young professional expert and yes, I’m a young professional, but I’m trying to help experienced professionals plan and prepare. We’re trying to create the next group of leaders.”
Harvard Business Review reports that turnover can cost a company 200% of an employee’s annual salary. Parker said the annual price tag for young professional turnover is $30.5 billion dollars.
“The amount of money that companies can save working with a retention consultant,” Parker said. “If a company can fix this problem now, they’re going to be well set. There are companies I’ve talked to who say, ‘We don’t have a problem,’ but 90% of the companies I’ve talked to do. But you can’t convince them of this.”
Annual cost of young professional turnover to companies: $30.5 billion
200% of an employee’s annual salary: the cost of employee turnover
-Harvard Business Review
