Definitions for terms related to retention
| Terms | Definition |
| Terms related to staying in a role | |
| Sustainable careers | ‘the sequence of an individual’s different career experiences, reflected through a variety of patterns of continuity over time, crossing several social spaces, and characterised by individual agency, herewith providing meaning to the individual’74 |
| Career longevity | ‘a fundamental metric that influences the overall legacy of an employee because for most individuals the measure of success is intrinsically related, although not perfectly correlated, to his or her career length’75 |
| Employee/personnel loyalty | ‘may be measured in terms of expressed commitment to the (organisation) and its mission and in terms of length of employment’76 |
| Organisational commitment | ‘the relative strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization’77 |
| Occupational embeddedness | ‘the totality of forces that keep people in their present occupations’78 |
| Term related to leaving a role | |
| Turnover | ‘unplanned loss of workers who voluntarily leave and whom employers would prefer to keep’23 |
| Intention to quit | ‘how often the respondents seriously considered quitting the job, whether they wanted to quit, and whether they were actually planning to quit’79 |
| Exodus | Not defined in the literature. The Cambridge Dictionary has a business English definition of ‘the movement of lots of people or things away from a place’80 |
| Attrition | ‘exits from the workforce’30 generally presented as a rate over time’ |
| Career mobility | ‘the transition from one position to another’81 |
| Organisational change | ‘any change in the employing firm’78 |
| Job change | ‘any substantial changes in work responsibilities, hierarchical levels, or titles within an organization. It includes internal promotions, transfers, and demotions.’78 |
| Occupational change | ‘transitions that require fundamentally new skills, routines, and work environments and require fundamentally new training, education, or vocational preparation’78 |