The New Employment Contract: Investing in People Who Might Leave

The New Employment Contract: Investing in People Who Might Leave 

A client recently told me about a conversation that had shaken his confidence as a leader. One of his top performers—someone he’d invested heavily in developing—gave two weeks’ notice to take a position at another company. The announcement came just months after the company had paid for the employee to complete an expensive industry certification. 

“I feel like an idiot,” my client admitted. “We just spent thousands of dollars and countless hours training someone who’s now taking everything we taught them to a competitor. How am I supposed to justify that to my board?” 

I understood his frustration. Every business leader has felt the sting of investing in someone who leaves. It’s natural to question whether development investments make sense when there’s no guarantee of return. 

But here’s what I told him: “The fact that you trained someone so well that another company wanted to hire them doesn’t make you an idiot. It makes you the kind of leader that attracts talent in the first place. The real question isn’t whether to invest in people who might leave. It’s whether you can afford not to.” 

The Old Contract Is Dead 

For decades, the employment relationship operated on an implicit bargain: employees gave loyalty and employers provided security. You stayed with a company for twenty or thirty years, and in return, they took care of you until retirement. Both parties benefited from stability and predictability. 

That contract died sometime in the 1990s, killed by restructuring, downsizing, and the shift toward treating labor as a variable cost rather than a long-term investment. Companies broke the loyalty compact when they demonstrated that no amount of tenure would protect employees from being let go when financial pressures mounted. 

Employees learned the lesson. Loyalty became a liability. Staying too long in one place meant falling behind on skills and missing opportunities for advancement and higher compensation. The most capable people learned to keep their options open, to invest in their own marketability, to move when better opportunities arose. 

Yet many business leaders still operate with expectations formed under the old contract. They want employee loyalty without offering the security that loyalty was supposed to purchase. They want people to stay for years but resist investing in development that might make those people attractive to other employers. They’ve adapted their expectations of employees without adapting their approach to employment. 

That dissonance creates the exact outcome leaders fear most: talented people leave because staying doesn’t serve their interests. 

The New Contract: Performance for Employability 

The employment relationship that actually works in today’s environment looks fundamentally different. Instead of “loyalty for security,” the new contract is “performance for employability.” 

Here’s what that means: Employees bring their best work, their full engagement, and their genuine commitment while they’re with you. In return, you invest in making them more capable, more knowledgeable, and more valuable in the marketplace—even if that value eventually takes them somewhere else. 

This feels counterintuitive. Why would you deliberately make your employees more attractive to other companies? Isn’t that just training your competition’s future workforce? 

The counterintuitive truth is that investing in employability creates better outcomes than trying to hoard talent. When people know their skills are growing, when they’re gaining capabilities that enhance their career prospects, when they’re becoming more valuable in the market—they have less reason to leave in search of development elsewhere. 

People don’t primarily leave jobs for more money. They leave when they stop growing. They leave when they feel stuck. They leave when staying means falling behind while others advance. If your organization is where growth happens, if it’s where people gain skills and capabilities they couldn’t get elsewhere, you become the place talented people want to be—not the place they’re trying to escape. 

The Three Fears That Hold Leaders Back 

I’ve seen three primary fears prevent leaders from fully embracing this approach: 

The first fear is direct: “If I train them, they’ll leave.” This fear contains a grain of truth wrapped in faulty logic. Yes, people you train might leave. But people you don’t train will definitely leave—or worse, they’ll stay and become less capable year after year, unable to handle increasingly complex challenges. 

The choice isn’t between training people who stay versus training people who leave. It’s between having a capable workforce that might include some turnover, or an increasingly mediocre workforce where the best people leave anyway because they recognize they’re stagnating. 

The second fear is about competition: “I’m just making my competitors stronger.” This assumes that the skills and knowledge you’re developing are the primary competitive advantage. In reality, your competitive advantage comes from how you apply those capabilities, from the systems and culture you’ve built, from the relationships and institutional knowledge that can’t be easily transferred. 

When someone leaves your organization, they don’t take your competitive advantage with them. They take skills that were valuable in your context. Whether those skills prove valuable to a competitor depends entirely on whether that competitor has built the environment to use them effectively. Most haven’t. 

The third fear is about return on investment: “What if I invest all this money and they leave before I see returns?” This fear treats development investment like a capital expenditure with a defined payback period. That’s the wrong framework. 

Development investment isn’t a discrete transaction with a calculable return. It’s an ongoing investment in capability that creates compounding benefits while people are with you. Even if someone leaves after two years, you’ve had two years of enhanced capability. The question isn’t whether the investment paid off completely—it’s whether you got more value from those two years with a capable employee than you would have from two years with someone whose skills were stagnating. 

What Investing in Employability Actually Looks Like 

At Responsive Technology Partners, we’ve built our development approach around this principle. We invest heavily in training and certifications for our team, knowing full well that some will eventually take those credentials elsewhere. 

We send people to advanced technical training on security tools and methodologies. We pay for industry certifications that make them more marketable. We create opportunities to work on challenging projects that build expertise. We encourage people to develop specializations that might make them attractive candidates for roles that don’t even exist in our organization. 

This isn’t altruism. It’s strategic self-interest. 

When we invest in making our team members experts in security technologies, we immediately benefit from that expertise. We can serve clients better, solve more complex problems, and deliver higher-value services. Those capabilities create immediate returns that justify the investment regardless of how long someone stays. 

The investment also creates a virtuous cycle of talent attraction. When people in our industry know that working at RTP means gaining expertise and credentials that advance their careers, we attract people who are serious about their professional development. We get applicants who are focused on capability-building rather than just finding the highest immediate salary. Those are exactly the people you want—individuals who see employment as a growth opportunity rather than just a paycheck. 

And yes, some people do leave. They take positions that offer opportunities we can’t provide, or they move for personal reasons, or they find situations that better align with their long-term goals. When that happens, they leave as ambassadors rather than refugees. They speak well of their time with us. They send talent our way. Sometimes they even return later in their careers with capabilities we need. 

The Strategic Benefits of Employability Investment 

Beyond the obvious benefit of having more capable people while they’re with you, investing in employability creates several strategic advantages that aren’t immediately obvious. 

First, it dramatically reduces the anxiety that drives job searching. When people feel their skills growing and their market value increasing, they don’t spend their evenings on LinkedIn looking for the next opportunity. They’re not constantly monitoring job boards or taking calls from recruiters. The development itself becomes a retention tool because it addresses the underlying fear that drives people to keep their options open. 

Second, it creates internal mobility that reduces the need to hire externally. When you’re building capability across your team, you create opportunities for people to grow into new roles within your organization. The person who started in technical support and developed security expertise might become your next security analyst. That internal development is far less expensive and risky than external hiring, and it reinforces the culture of growth that attracts talent. 

Third, it builds resilience against key person dependencies. When you have one expert who knows everything about a critical system, you’re vulnerable to that person leaving or becoming unavailable. When you’re systematically developing capability across your team, you build redundancy and depth that protects against those dependencies. Multiple people can handle complex challenges rather than everything bottlenecking through one expert. 

Fourth, it forces you to build better systems and documentation. When you’re intentionally developing people, you can’t afford to have critical knowledge exist only in someone’s head. You have to document processes, build knowledge bases, and create systems that allow people to grow into new capabilities without requiring years of trial and error. Those systems create value that persists even when individuals leave. 

The Difference Between Development and Retention Schemes 

There’s an important distinction between investing in employability and implementing retention schemes designed to trap people. 

Some companies try to address turnover through mechanisms like retention bonuses, repayment agreements for training costs, non-compete clauses, or other contractual barriers to leaving. These approaches share a common assumption: people would leave if they could, so we need mechanisms to prevent them from doing so. 

That assumption creates exactly the dynamic it fears. When people feel trapped rather than engaged, when they’re staying because of contractual obligations rather than because the work is meaningful, they become less effective. They do the minimum required rather than bringing their full capability. They disengage mentally even if they can’t leave physically. 

Investing in employability operates from the opposite assumption: people want to do meaningful work and grow their capabilities, and they’ll stay where that’s happening. The focus shifts from preventing departure to creating conditions that make staying attractive. 

This doesn’t mean you never use retention mechanisms. Sometimes retention bonuses or repayment agreements make sense for very specific, high-cost training investments. But they should be the exception, not the foundation of your retention strategy. The foundation should be creating an environment where talented people want to stay because staying serves their interests. 

What This Means for How You Hire 

Embracing the new employment contract changes how you approach hiring. You’re no longer looking for people who will stay forever. You’re looking for people who will create exceptional value during the time they’re with you, however long that turns out to be. 

This shifts your criteria. Instead of asking “will this person stay for five years?” you ask “will this person grow their capabilities while they’re here?” Instead of looking for people who seem content with limited growth, you look for people who are hungry to develop expertise. Instead of avoiding candidates who might be “overqualified,” you actively seek people whose capabilities can grow beyond their current role. 

This also means being honest in the recruiting process about what you offer. You’re not promising lifetime employment or even long-term stability. You’re promising the opportunity to work on challenging problems, to develop valuable capabilities, and to grow expertise that will serve them throughout their careers. For the right people—the ones you actually want—that’s a compelling offer. 

The Conversation That Changed My Perspective 

Years ago, I was frustrated about losing a talented team member to a larger competitor. I mentioned it to a mentor who had built and sold several successful companies. I expected sympathy. Instead, he challenged my entire framing. 

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “While this person worked for you, were they good at their job?” 

“Exceptional,” I admitted. 

“Did they help you serve clients better?” 

“Absolutely.” 

“Did they help develop other team members?” 

“They were one of our best mentors.” 

“Did they speak well of your company when they left?” 

“They did, actually. They said it was a hard decision and they’d recommend us to anyone.” 

“Then what exactly is the problem?” he asked. “You got years of exceptional work from someone who helped build your business and left as an advocate. That’s a successful employment relationship, not a failure.” 

He was right. I’d been measuring success by whether people stayed rather than by the value created during their tenure. That realization changed how I thought about development investment. 

Making It Practical 

If you’re ready to embrace this approach, here are the practical elements that make it work: 

Invest in structured development pathways. People need to see clear opportunities for growth, not vague promises of “advancement.” What skills will they develop? What certifications can they pursue? What increasingly complex challenges will they tackle? Make the growth trajectory visible and achievable. 

Create a culture of knowledge sharing. When people develop expertise, build systems to capture and share that knowledge. Document processes. Run training sessions where experts teach others. Create opportunities for people to mentor less experienced team members. This multiplies the value of individual development and reduces key person dependencies. 

Measure capability growth, not just tenure. Track certifications earned, skills developed, and expertise gained across your team. Celebrate people becoming more capable, not just people staying longer. What you measure and celebrate shapes your culture. 

Be transparent about development investments. When you send someone to training or pay for certifications, make clear that you’re investing in their growth and capability, not just in skills you need this quarter. Help them see how what they’re learning serves their long-term career, not just your immediate needs. 

Maintain relationships with alumni. When good people leave, keep the connection. They might return with new capabilities. They might refer talented people your way. They might become clients or partners. Treating departures as relationship transitions rather than relationship endings creates ongoing value. 

The Real Risk 

Here’s what keeps me up at night as a business leader: not the risk that we’ll invest in someone who leaves, but the risk that we’ll become the kind of company that talented people want to escape. 

When you stop investing in people’s growth, when you hoard talent rather than developing capability, when you view employee development as a cost to minimize rather than an investment to maximize, you create an environment where the best people leave and the mediocre stay. You select for people who aren’t focused on their own growth and development—exactly the opposite of what you need to thrive. 

The new employment contract recognizes a fundamental truth: you can’t prevent people from leaving if they want to. You can only create conditions that make them want to stay. Investing in their employability, in making them more capable and valuable in the marketplace, is one of the most powerful ways to create those conditions. 

My client who felt like an idiot for training someone who left? Six months later, he called with an update. The person who had left reached out to recommend someone for an open position—someone exceptional who specifically mentioned that they wanted to work somewhere that invested in development the way my client’s company did. 

“I guess I wasn’t training my competition,” he said. “I was building a reputation as a place where serious professionals come to grow their capabilities. Turns out that’s a pretty good recruiting tool.” 

He’s right. In a market where talent has options and the best people are in high demand, being known as a place that invests in people’s growth isn’t a weakness. It’s your strongest competitive advantage. 

Even when some of those people eventually leave. 

Tom Glover is Chief Revenue Officer at Responsive Technology Partners, specializing in cybersecurity and risk management. With over 35 years of experience helping organizations navigate the complex intersection of technology and risk, Tom provides practical insights for business leaders facing today’s security challenges.