HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT AND ACADEMIC STAFF RETENTION IN PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN SOUTHWEST, NIGERIA

Abstract

Staff retention is an administrative initiative to retain employees in an organization. It comprises practices and guidelines on employee remuneration and compensation management, fostering an enabling, healthy and safe work environment as well as improving interpersonal connections. Previous studies on staff retention considered long-term organizational employee engagement, employee orientation, training, development, socialization, high recruitment costs, and the density of enticing skilled workers. However, little attention was paid to academic staff retention in universities in Nigeria, particularly privately-owned ones. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of human capital development programmes on academic staff retention in chosen private universities in the country. This study was anchored on the Human Capital Theory. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The total population of the study was 1,736 academic staff in nine chosen private universities in South-West, Nigeria. The stratified random sampling technique was used to choose participants from professorship to graduate assistant. Besides, a simple random sampling technique was used to choose 346 academic staff. An adapted questionnaire tagged Human Capital Development, and Academic Staff Retention Questionnaire (HCDASRQ) was used for data collection, while Cronbach alpha was employed in validating the instrument with a reliability value of (r=0.99). Findings revealed that there is application and effect of human capital development programmes on academic staff retention in the chosen universities. The study concluded that human capital development had a significant effect on academic staff retention in the chosen private universities.