Key Factors Supporting Tenure

Tenure generally refers to the length of time that an employee stays in a company or an organization. People with long tenure may be perceived as a good fit, invested in the agency’s mission, and dedicated to their employer, just to name a few positive characteristics. Employers also benefit from employees with greater tenure because it indicates (among other things) stability in an organization. A study of child welfare data gathered between 2003 and 2015, found that the average tenure (measured as the length of time between first and last case assigned) was 1.8 years for caseworkers and 2.5 years for supervisors. This measure of tenure does not reflect how long an employee was with a child welfare agency, but it does provide a benchmark for how long one may typically stay in a case-carrying position, and it is a relatively short time. (For example, the average tenure of an employee in the U.S. around that same time period was 4.4 years (2010), and decreased to 4.1 years in 2020 and 2022 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

The cost of recruiting, selecting, and training a child welfare worker is high, which makes it important to bring the right person into the child welfare workforce. The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) reviewed workforce meta-analyses to understand what predicts tenure, given the importance of this issue in child welfare agencies. The review showed that biodata (e.g., education, job history, interests) and continuance commitment were both moderate predictors, meaning that these variables are correlated with one’s likelihood of staying in a job.

• Biodata, or biographical or background data about job candidates (e.g., work experience, education level, interests), are measured by a specific type of hiring tool. The QIC-WD Biodata Measures Umbrella Summary summarizes the benefits and challenges to creating these measures and discusses their value in predicting tenure.
• “Continuance commitment consists of the need to stay at the organization based on analysis of the possible costs and benefits incurred from leaving.” The QIC-WD Organizational Commitment Umbrella Summary includes this definition as one of three parts of organizational commitment and discusses how it is measured and why it’s important. The other two factors related to organizational commitment also predict tenure.

Child welfare agencies and the families they serve benefit from workforce stability and workers who believe in the work they are doing. Agencies that seek employees that will stay may want to identify job candidates with the characteristics found to predict tenure. More research is needed to determine the value of biodata specific to the field of child welfare but there are available tools to measure organizational commitment that can be used with the workforce.