You are Marieke Coppens, Group People Lead at Vlaamse TechWorks, an Antwerp industrial-software firm with 2,600 staff. Its mid-career delivery engineers, the ones clients ask for by name, are leaving at 24% a year. The October board wants your diagnosis in four weeks, and EUR 4.2 million will follow it.
The situation
It is Monday, 7 September 2026, and you have been in the job six weeks. Vlaamse TechWorks turns over EUR 410 million at an 11% margin and has twice won its industry's best-employer award for pay and benefits. Even so, voluntary turnover has gone from 11.2% to 17% in a year, and to 24% among mid-career delivery engineers. Here work is sold on named people: clients contract specific engineers and renewals follow them. Each departure costs about EUR 55,000 in recruitment, vacancy and ramp-up.
The board has ring-fenced EUR 4.2 million for development and wellbeing for one budget cycle. If the measures do not move, the money goes back to recruitment. Today 78% of that budget goes to the early-career third of the workforce, through the graduate programme that won the awards; the other 22% covers everyone else. Your own variable pay depends on the four measures the board has adopted: a career-sustainability index (41 out of 100), retention (83%), employability (48) and wellbeing (45).
The mid-career group has had no substantial development in four years or more, is in the decade when caring for children or parents peaks, and holds the client relationships. There are three readings of why it is leaving, each with an advocate. Learning and development holds that four years without development have left skills gaps. The reward team points out that exit interviews mention money and rival offers. And the workforce review points to flat career paths and working arrangements that do not fit that stage of life.
Bart Vermeiren, chair of the works council, has warned that he will file a formal grievance if another cycle passes with token amounts for experienced staff. An Peeters, the delivery director, replies that the graduate programme is the firm's only reliable source of engineers. The proposals already on your desk add up to more than EUR 4.2 million.