Analysing the issue and recommending a solution
Explaining the issue
- Start by separating three things, exactly as in the external problem standard:
- the symptom — what businesses have noticed
- the causes — why it is happening
- the effects — what it does to the business, and to whom
- Explain (Achieved) means saying what the issue is and why it occurs. Fully explain (Merit) means carrying it through to the impact on business or stakeholder goals.
Building the causes
- Human resource issues almost always have causes at three levels, and finding all three is what makes the analysis look complete:
- Individual — what makes a particular person leave, disengage or underperform: pay, hours, workload, treatment, career path, personal circumstances.
- Business — what the employer does or fails to do: how it recruits, trains, pays, rosters, supervises and communicates.
- External — what neither can control: the labour market, immigration settings, the region's housing and transport, the sector's reputation, demographic change.
- A student who writes only about individual causes ("people leave because they want more money") has missed two thirds of the issue.
Tracing the effects
- Effects run in more directions than candidates expect, and naming several is what evidences complexity:
- Direct cost — recruitment, advertising, agency fees, induction, training.
- Lost productivity — a new employee takes months to reach full effectiveness, and the people training them are also less productive.
- Lost knowledge — the departing employee takes what they knew about customers, processes and problems.
- Pressure on remaining staff, which causes further turnover — the effect that makes the issue self-reinforcing.
- Service or quality falling, which reaches customers.
- Management time, spent recruiting instead of running the business.
- On the employees themselves — workload, stress, safety, morale.
- On the wider community, where the business is a significant local employer.
Building a range of solutions
- Two or more, and they should be genuinely different from each other. Draw them from different levels:
- Pay and conditions — rates, allowances, hours, rosters, flexibility, leave.
- Recruitment — where the business looks, how it describes the role, how fast it responds, whether it recruits for potential rather than experience.
- Training and development — investing in the people already there, apprenticeships, career pathways.
- Management practice — supervision quality, feedback, consultation, recognition.
- Job design — changing the work itself: workload, variety, autonomy, progression.
- Structural — automation, redeploying staff, restructuring the roster, contracting out.
- Retention specifically — stay interviews, exit interviews acted on, service recognition.
- For each solution: what it is, how it addresses the causes you identified, what it would cost, and what its drawbacks are.
Recommending the best possible solution
- Excellence requires you to recommend the best possible solution — "best in the student's judgement". So you must choose, and justify the choice.
- Judge against stated criteria. Say what they are:
- Does it address the actual causes, or only the symptom?
- Can this business afford it, given what you found?
- How quickly does it work? Some issues need relief now; others need a five-year fix.
- Is it durable, or does the problem return when the incentive stops?
- Who else does it affect — existing staff, customers, the community?
- Then write the recommendation the same way as in the externals:
- state it plainly
- give the rejected option its strongest case
- explain why yours wins against the criterion you named
- add something new — a long-term effect, a second-order consequence, a risk
- say what would change your mind