ISSN 1993-8233 ©2010 Academic Journals

Tertiary educational institutions depend on their employees ’ skills, knowledge, and abilities for efficient and effective delivery of services in order to stay abreast with new changes and to achieve the vision of the institution. Therefore, attracting and retaining skilled, employees have become an important aspect for institutions. Where there are no clear retention strategies to retain employees the ultimate goals of the institution might not be achieved. The main objective of the study was to find out reasons why staff members resign after attending development programmes, which would assist the institution to developed retention strategies, as it prepares itself to become a university of science and technology that requires more and better qualified staff. The enquiry employed a case study approach because it dealt with a specific institution in Windhoek, Namibia. A triangulation method was utilised to solicit information from academics, administrative and support staff by conducting semi-structured interviews with Head of Departments (HODs) and sectional heads. A closed-ended questionnaire was distributed to 230 staff members of which 130 responded, which gave a considerable satisfactorily response rate of 65%. Research proved convincingly that there are no retention strategies in place and also no good reward systems to retain staff that attended development programmes. A total of fifty-six (56) staff members resigned from the institution after obtaining their qualification. It was evident from th