The good news? Turnover rates across the market have flattened in recent years. The bad news? They’ve generally stayed flat and have even gotten markedly worse in some sectors. Surveys from the Mercer consulting firm in both the US and Canada show that this trend is unfolding across North America.
Social and economic unrest are pushing employees to seek stability, which means employee development programs will be a valuable tool in the years ahead for HR and L&D teams to combat turnover. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. The shift to remote and hybrid schedules makes conducting traditional employee development practices challenging.
You might have the right trainers and administrators and the right content. But your employee development strategy will fall flat without reliable technology to connect your employees with these resources. If your goal is to turn your employees into high performers, you need to develop an employee training program that fits today’s varied modes of working.
This guide explains what employee development should look like in the modern workplace and offers best practices to generate higher performance from your hybrid workforce.
What is employee development?
Employee development is the process by which an individual acquires new skills or improves existing ones that are valuable to themselves, their employer, or, ideally, both. Those skills could be anything.
- Working with new technologies
- Expanding industry or subject matter knowledge
- Improving domain-specific abilities
- Or honing soft skills such as time management or communication
Employees can take charge of their development, or an organization can offer formal or informal employee development programs. This guide focuses on the latter but strongly emphasizes finding ways to connect employee self-improvement with your organizational goals.
Developing employees is most effective when mutually beneficial to both employees and employers. Employers can bring a greater scope of resources to bear, and employees—the program's subjects—are more invested and capable of maximizing their growth. It’s a win-win.
An example of employee development
Let’s consider the example of a sales representative within your organization. Both they and their management want to improve their negotiation skills. This will help your rep close deals more efficiently and possibly earn more commissions, increasing revenue for the company—your win-win scenario.
You create a professional development plan for this employee. It includes a shadowing mentorship with a senior sales rep within your company and a schedule of industry workshops they’re expected to attend several times a year. They’ll learn the ins and outs of your sales process by helping your veteran sales rep close deals. At the same time, they’ll gain outside knowledge from trade shows that your company needs to attend anyway for prospecting.
Why is employee development important?
Research consistently shows that a lack of career development opportunities is a major contributor to employee turnover. This is universal, not specific to any industry or region. And when employees have opportunities in their day-to-day jobs to learn and develop new skills, they are consistently more engaged with their work and the organization.
So, the takeaway is that you must take a more personalized approach to managing employees. Employee development plays a significant role in that. Even if you already have a solid development program, pushing to create more personalized experiences for each employee will set your organization apart and help improve retention.
The challenge is that personalized development programs become cumbersome very quickly without the proper tools and support. Strategic focus can drift too, as there’s an increased risk of each employee’s plan diverging in separate directions rather than staying aligned with your corporate goals.
Professional development & career development
Broadly speaking, developing employees has two primary functions: professional development and career development. Each plays a different role in helping employees move forward.
- Professional development: Here, you focus on developing domain-specific expertise within your employee’s current field. Common professional development methods include acquiring certifications, attending conferences, or gaining job-specific skills through apprenticeships or shadowing arrangements. Professional development is a great way to improve an employee’s performance and productivity, and it can also help create a clearer pathway for individual advancement.
- Career development: Whereas professional development focuses more on improving performance in the here and now, career development prepares employees for what comes next, such as a senior specialist role or an executive leadership position. Your and your employee’s focus is on improving their performance next year rather than next month—the time horizon is longer. It tends to include training in more soft skills, such as communication, conflict resolution, and strategic leadership functions. This helps ensure your organization has a steady pipeline of future leaders already in-house.
Employee development vs. employee training
These practices are often confused. They both include similar educational activities, but their goals and time horizons differ. Employee development focuses on the future, whether you’re improving their capabilities in their current or future roles.
Employee training focuses more on the here and now, equipping your employees with the essential skills they need to execute work today. The focus is more on essential functions and closing necessary skill gaps. Think new hire onboarding programs or compliance training.
Benefits of employee development
You can see on the surface how employee development can be a win-win. Supporting employees in their growth will benefit any organization. But its value extends further than many initially see.
- Improve employee retention: Retaining talent isn't getting any easier, so anything that helps you keep institutional knowledge in your organization can be incredibly valuable. Presenting clear development pathways makes employees much more willing to stay with your company. It’s the rare employee who likes job hunting and interviewing. If you can help them see a future with your company, you’ll motivate them that much more today.
- Enhance business performance: Retention aside, developing your workers is in the self-interest of any company. When your team stays up to date on the latest tools and practices, your company runs more efficiently (and gets better results).
- Attract higher-quality talent: Once you have an established employee development program in place, you’ll inevitably help employees advance. Hopefully, some opportunities will be within your organization, but some will be external. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Word will spread about your development program. High-performing individuals are inherently self-motivated. And they’ll be more likely to pursue opportunities in your organization if they know you’ll support their career growth.
- Support a culture of engagement: Employees who feel supported and challenged to learn new skills are more likely to be satisfied with their jobs. If you can provide that at scale, you’ll have a thriving culture of engagement that will help keep everyone motivated and working hard.
The employee development lifecycle
Developing employees is most effective when you personalize it to the individual employee. It’s even more effective when you provide support tailored to the specific stage in their lifecycle with your company. How you develop someone in their first year will look quite different from their fifth or even tenth year. It’s helpful to consider each employee’s life cycle, which follows four stages.
1. Onboarding
This is your foundation, starting even before you hire a new employee. From the interview process through intake and training, whether you’re intentional about it or not, you’re giving them the fundamental knowledge, skills, and cultural understanding they need to integrate into your organization. New hire training does this in a focused way, but even at the interview stage, you expose candidates to your business culture. Every development effort afterwards is built on this foundation.
2. Initial development
Whereas the onboarding stage focuses on integration and meeting requirements, the initial development stage is where you start building core competencies. Integration is complete, so now it’s time to start pushing. Your goal here is to help the employee become fully proficient in their role.
3. Retention
Proficient employees are valuable. Once you’ve developed one, you should try to keep one. Replacing that employee can cost half to two times an FTE’s salary. Retaining them keeps valuable expertise and institutional knowledge in your organization and mitigates the cost of bringing in someone new.
4. Separation
Inevitably, an employee will leave, so your goal is to make the separation as mutually beneficial and as simple as possible. It also presents an opportunity to collect meaningful insights from that employee that might not be shared otherwise. They can reflect on your operations and also their own development. They can offer valuable perspectives on how you can develop employees better.
Building an effective employee development program
An employee development plan is a roadmap. It provides clarity both for the employee and the organization about where they can go and how they can get there. But figuring out how to design those roadmaps—in other words, how to build your L&D team’s employee development program—isn’t always easy.
Here’s a six-step process any organization can adapt to their own needs. It covers key actions needed to design a development program, regardless of your business size, industry, or focus.
1. Perform skills gap analysis
Identify your organization's specific skills and knowledge gaps. These will highlight what’s valuable for the organization to develop internally and the easiest advancement opportunities for employees. At an individual level, skill gap analyses for employees will help pinpoint what they should each focus on for growth.
2. Identify employees for development
Motivated employees will step forward on their own. Now that you’ve established the skills and capabilities your organization needs to develop internally, the next step is to bridge the gap with the right people. In the early days, focusing on professional development was an easy way to get “quick wins” that you could show to leadership and provide short-term benefits.
3. Align employee and company objectives
Remember, employee development is most beneficial when it’s a win-win. At this stage, you’ll know what your company needs to improve and have helped your employees identify what they want for themselves. Now it’s time to bring these goals together. One beneficial tool many companies find useful is the ‘stay interview,’ which you can think of as the opposite of an exit interview. This is a facilitated conversation between an employee and their manager or an HR representative. Here, you try to understand what a high-impact employee needs most to stay engaged and growing with your company.
4. Plan for longer term growth
An employee development plan can address short-term needs through professional development. However, shifting towards pursuing longer-term career development opportunities is important as your program grows. Bring in corporate leadership at this point so you can better understand your company’s strategic goals. Use those to help identify the future leaders and skill sets you’ll need to achieve those goals. Then focus on career development with interested employees towards them.
5. Encourage continuous learning
By progressing through these first four steps, you’ll have developed a fairly strong program, but it might not yet be self-sustaining. This is where culture-building comes in. You want to embed development into the daily fabric of your employees’ lives. Encourage your leaders—especially those who’ve gone through your program—to model a growth mindset and communicate the range of development opportunities your HR or L&D team can offer.
6. Track your performance data
Monitor the effectiveness of your employee development plan by regularly meeting with employees to gather feedback and identify any obstacles. As an organization, dedicate resources to tracking the success of development initiatives. Use data on productivity and team achievements to inform future decisions and refine your approach. A modern development platform can make data collection quite easy.
Developing high-performance talent is key to retention
A genuine commitment to employee development can be a more powerful engine for organic growth than many traditional business methodologies. High-performing individuals are inherently driven to seek purpose and continuous improvement.
By building an employee development program that supports growth and learning, your company not only cultivates the loyalty of your most engaged employees but also becomes a magnet for other top-tier talent. This creates a virtuous cycle where ambitious individuals see your organization as a place to invest in their future. And that kind of reputation drives long-term success and vitality.
