THE TALENT RETENTION IN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS OF MALAYSIA

Abstract

Talent retention in international schools of Malaysia is a critical issue as it is one of the top three industries having high turnover rate in the period of July 2010 to June 2011. According to Michael Page(2015), 84% of the employees in Malaysia have the idea of not staying in the current role in next 3 years’ time or lesser; means that in three years’ time, many organisations will face many turnover issues. Furthermore, the number of international schools is growing rapidly in Malaysia. Thus, the purpose of this research was to ascertain the relationship between retention factors and talent retention in the international schools of Malaysia. There are three factors included in this study namely, reward management, work-life balance and career progression. This research is a cross-sectional study using quantitative methods based on descriptive research. Convenience sampling is used for the study. Self-administered questionnaires had been distributed online and 362employees of international schools in Malaysia participated in the surveyand this amount is more than the requirement (338 employees) based on Krejcie and Morgan (1970). The questions in questionnaire were adopted after referring to the work of Balakrishnan and Vijayalakshmi (2014), Hasan and Teng (2017), Ladkin and Kichuk (2017), Ng et. al. (2012), Nirmala (2014), Satpal (2016), Simmons (2012), andTurnea (2018). The findings indicated that career progression andwork life balance have positive relationship with talentretention,especially career progression whichhas the highest influence on talentretention, whereas reward management has a significantly negative relationship with talentretention in the international schools of Malaysia. Hence, based on the findings, this research proposed measures to enhancethe competitiveness of this critical industry in Malaysiavia appropriate retention programs.