What happened
In an opinion piece, as reported by Talent Canada, Trevor Hawkins, country manager for Canada at ManpowerGroup, argues that employees are not unmotivated. They want growth, and many employers are not giving them a visible way to get it.
He draws on the 2025 State of Careers series from Right Management, which includes The Career Equation and The Career Imperative. The research, as he describes it, finds that employees who see clear development opportunities are much more likely to stay. Those who do not are twice as likely to leave within a year.
He also cites the ManpowerGroup 2025 Talent Shortage Survey, where 77 per cent of Canadian employers said they struggle to find skilled workers. Almost half of workers' core skills are expected to change by 2027, mainly because of AI and digital change. Nearly one-third of workers in Canada took job-related training in 2024. Note that the author's own organization produced the research, so read it as one view, not an independent finding.
Why it matters if you are hiring
The practical point is cost. If you cannot find skilled people on the open market, every resignation in a hard-to-fill role hurts twice: you lose the person and you restart a slow search. Retention in those roles is a hiring strategy.
The piece argues that annual reviews and fixed career ladders were built for a slower pace. It suggests a lattice instead, where people move sideways and diagonally as skills and interests change. For an employer, that means treating an analyst who moves into operations, or a line lead who moves into quality, as an internal hire you planned for, not a loss from one team.
It also changes how you sell the job. Candidates are bringing growth expectations into the search. Job postings and interviews that explain how the role will develop, and who will support that, compete better than pay alone.
The author's three starting points are project-based and cross-functional work with mentoring, short micro-learning tied to career goals, and shared accountability. Employees set the vision, managers guide the conversations and the organization provides the tools.
One thing to do this week
Pick your three hardest roles to fill. For each, ask the manager to hold a 20-minute career conversation with the person in it, and write down one skill they could build in the next six months and one adjacent role it could lead to. Then use that answer in your next job posting for the role.
Traverse helps Canadian employers find and place experienced professionals across operations, finance, sales, manufacturing and technical roles, including people who are looking for the next step in their careers, not only the next job.