According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person holds 11.7 jobs between the ages of 18 and 48. That’s an average tenure of just under 31 months per job; hovering around two and a half years. Can you make your department run efficiently if you have each position becoming vacant every 31 months? Probably not.

In a dealership environment, it takes months of training and experience to get up to speed. In a department of 30 people, you’re on the prowl to fill a vacancy once per month. Undoubtedly, you have better things to do with your time than constantly tapping into the HR department for applicants, interviews, and sorting out bad hires. Wouldn’t you rather focus on finetuning the sales on your smooth-running ship than plugging holes in the hull?

It takes some planning today, but you can minimize your employee churn. Many employees take a job to get a foot in the door, expecting opportunity for advancement. If it’s never offered or discussed, they’ll become restless and leave. As part of a successful management team, you need to know where each of your staff members wants to end up in one year, five years, and even ten years.

Putting a plan into action will solidify your team with good people and reduce the times you’re sorting through resumes.

Discover Each Employee’s Career Goals

You should be completing performance evaluations with every staff member, right? When you do, it’s a great opportunity to find out where that staff member wants to be down the road. Are they looking to move up the ladder quickly? What is their ‘dream job’ at the dealership? How can you help them get there? Or is this just a job in the meantime, or a position they’re content to perform for the foreseeable future?

You need to know each person’s trajectory. In fact, make yourself a spreadsheet and categorize where all your staff members are headed. Whether it’s management, ownership, or to a different industry, knowing where each person is headed, and how many are taking the same path, will help you plan for the future.

Assess Your Deficiencies

With your whole team plotted out on a spreadsheet, take a look at the positions that don’t have someone coming up through the ranks. Of course, the entry level positions like cashiers, wash bay technicians, and service drive greeters and valets won’t have a long list of names waiting, but the others should.

If you have positions that can’t be filled in-house when a vacancy opens up, you have a deficiency. These deficiencies are harmful two-fold: they prevent you from managing because you’re focused on hiring, and they are unproductive while a new team member gets up to speed.

With deficiencies, you can either bring new people on board who will cross-train for those positions when a need arises, or you can coach another staff to change their trajectory – but only if it fits!

Connect the Dots

Now that you have your goals and deficiencies worked out, it’s time to put boots to dirt. As a manager, you can keep your staffs’ eyes from wandering to other workplaces by giving them a task to focus on. Plan out a career path with each one, which is revisited annually. Make it a visual career path, written down or sketched out on paper, so it becomes real to the staff. But that’s not where it stops.

Pair each person with someone in the next level position to learn the ropes and find out what the position is all about. Then once that level has been achieved, do the same thing with the next position, then the next, until the career goal has been achieved, the goal changes, or the employee moves on.

What’s the Point?

We all know the statistics, so why put in the time and effort of creating career paths? It’s because the tenure at each position will be longer when you do so, and you can prevent good people from taking their leave too early. And that’s not even taking into consideration the financial costs of training new hires – that’s another topic altogether.