6 Reasons Why Employee Development Is Key

To succeed in any industry, companies must constantly innovate and evolve to stay on the cutting edge — and that entails helping their employees continuously develop.

Making employee development a key part of company culture ensures workers stay up to date on industry best practices and learn new skills. This, in turn, boosts employee engagement and attracts top talent. 

So, what exactly is employee development and why should you care about it? Read on to learn the benefits and how to seamlessly integrate a people development plan into your company.

What Is Employee Development?

Employee development  — often referred to as professional development or staff development — encompasses any professional training or continuing education that an employer facilitates in order to support workers in furthering their careers. It covers a variety of learning opportunities, including seminars, professional certifications, higher education courses and mentorship programs.

Prioritizing staff development ensures that team members’ skills evolve in accordance with industry trends and best practices. And employers who invest in additional education that complements an employee’s career trajectory can see higher retention rates, more engaged staff and greater revenue.

Professional development is meant to improve employees’ skills and knowledge so they can progress in their overall career path, not just build a skill set for a particular role. While it’s ultimately the individual’s responsibility to own their professional development, it’s to the employer’s benefit to encourage continuing education by ensuring staff have access to both internal and external learning opportunities.

Why Is Employee Development Important?

Employers who invest in staff development help their employees hone strengths and grow skills, which better equips them for their current roles. This adds more value to the work they do and directly benefits the business.

Perhaps more impactful, though, is the value employees and job seekers place on people-development opportunities when considering offers. Making learning and development a focus of your company culture helps improve employee engagement, increase retention and attract elite candidates.

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1. Employees Want Career Growth

A big reason why employees quit jobs is because of a lack of professional development opportunities. About a third of workers who left their jobs in 2021 cited no career advancement opportunities as their reason for leaving. Develop your employees’ careers, and they’ll reward you with improved performance and higher retention.

2. Professional Development Benefits Retention

Employee development is a long-term investment that can help retain and grow your talent. Just over half of U.S. employees were satisfied with their jobs overall in 2023, and 44 percent were satisfied with their opportunities for training and skills development. So dedicating resources to employee retention is more important than ever.

3. Employees Need Professional Development to Reach Their Full Potential

An MIT Sloan study found that 49 percent of respondents believe that not having access to good career advice has negatively impacted their job trajectory. That leaves many employees set up to feel undervalued and underdeveloped, inevitably resulting in a disengaged workforce and high turnover rates. Investing in people development allows your talent to feel good about growing their skills, and learning opportunities can translate into integral promotions that allow you to retain top talent.

4. Employees Stay at Companies That Invest in Staff Development

If companies provided higher-quality training and development opportunities, almost 80 percent of employees would stay longer. People development is an attractive employee benefit. If you don’t start investing in your team and developing your employees, your employees will find someone who will.

5. Employees in Training Courses Are More Productive

Learning and development opportunities improve productivity. Employees become more confident when given chances to build their skills and knowledge, allowing them to complete work more efficiently and effectively. And as employees gain more capabilities, teams can get more done without having to hire additional personnel. 

6. Companies That Invest in Employee Development Are More Profitable 

Employee development boosts profitability. Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management showed that an employer’s year-long soft skills training program led to a roughly 250 percent return on investment within eight months. Upskilling could boost global GDP as much as $6.5 trillion by 2030, according to one 2021 report.

How to Create a Strong Employee Development Plan

If you don’t currently have a professional development plan in place, it’s time to implement an employee development plan for your team.

Tailoring the plan to reflect your unique workforce is critical. Your industry and staff size will be driving forces, but learning styles, preferences, subject matter and accessibility are all factors to consider, too. If the professional development opportunities you offer don’t appeal to or benefit your employees, they’ll lose interest and disengage with the program. 

Use the following guidelines to implement an employee development plan in your company.

1. Evaluate Your Company and Long-Term Goals 

Before you can put a plan into action, you must assess your current workforce and company with the future you envision. Take stock of how your employees and teams operate today. Then, consider what may need to change in order to progress and what challenges could arise along the way. 

A successful plan should achieve three main objectives. First, you should aim to provide opportunities that meet your employees’ individual aspirations. This is a strategic employee engagement play that will make your people feel valued and keep them interested in their work.

Secondly, your plan should address your company’s long-term strategy and growth goals. What are the major benchmarks you hope to reach, and which of your employees’ skills need to be developed or acquired in order to meet these objectives? 

As you grow, leadership roles will undoubtedly open, providing you with more opportunities to promote from within. The third facet of your employee development plan should address leadership training by helping employees grow as future managers and leaders of your company.

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2. Create Employee-Specific Development Plans

Have managers sit down with their direct reports to discuss what employees enjoy about their work, what they find difficult, what disinterests them and how they hope to progress in their role. Employees should be held accountable for adhering to their development plan, but managers are responsible for guiding and supporting reports on their career paths. 

Encourage employees and managers to meet regularly to discuss the employee’s development plan and brainstorm opportunities for professional development. Again, tailoring opportunities to the individual is key; if they’re not receptive to the training format or subject matter, they likely won’t retain the information and the learning opportunity will have been wasted.

3. Provide Development Offerings

Use employee-specific plans to create company-wide professional development opportunities. If several employees say they’d like to take various skills training courses but don’t have the time for an event outside of work hours, consider purchasing an online learning subscription. Employees can share access to the platform and complete courses from the comfort of their own homes without taking time away from work. 

Additionally, if a majority of employees show interest in learning more about a specific topic, such as public speaking, host a training seminar. To cut costs, tap into your leadership team’s networks to identify a talented orator and colleague who may be interested in sharing a few tips during a lunch-and-learn. If employees are split across subject matter and learning avenues, consider offering a professional development stipend to support employees in their individual pursuits.

4. Evaluate Your Efforts and Solicit Feedback

Depending on the material, the immediate benefits of employee development can be difficult to gauge. You probably won’t see new deals close overnight as a result of sales training, but you will see substantially higher close rates and employee retention in the long run.

The strongest indicator of success will be your employees’ responses. Because professional development opportunities are drivers of employee engagement, conducting regular employee engagement surveys is an effective way to measure your team members’ interest in and happiness with your professional development offerings. 

Ensure managers routinely check in on their direct reports’ progress. Is additional training required to master a particular skill? Did they discover a more efficient way to tackle their responsibilities? Which learning opportunities did they enjoy the most, and which did they dislike? Managers should adjust the individual employee’s development plan accordingly and communicate big-picture ideas to leadership so they can modify the company-wide strategy.

Employee Development Examples

The following ideas can be implemented in your organization to promote learning and development organically.

1. Implement Mentorship Opportunities

Access to industry experts and the chance to learn from them is a top priority among job seekers, especially tech candidates. The fast-paced evolution of the tech industry makes continual professional development a necessity, and working alongside experts in the field organically integrates regular learning opportunities into the role.

Mentorship can take place within the office where managers and leaders mentor individual contributors, or companies can consider implementing a mentorship program that spans outside the department or even the office. Seek out individuals who are naturally great mentors and want to foster meaningful relationships. Don’t forget to reward them for their time and help.

2. Create Shadowing Opportunities

Professional development shouldn’t be limited to an employee’s current field. Give your team members a chance to learn from one another by creating a shadowing program that empowers employees to observe the role of a colleague for a day, a week or even months at a time. This promotes cross-departmental collaboration, improves how teams work together and fosters employee relationships.

A shadowing program is exceptionally helpful for when an employee becomes disengaged with their work. Making it easy to explore other career paths within your organization shows you value your people as individuals, not just employees, and increases the likelihood of retaining a great employee who just needs a new passion.

3. Host Lunch-And-Learns

Promote knowledge transfer by planning lunch-and-learns where individuals can share information about their line of work, new developments in their field and how their work impacts other teams. You could also use the time as an opportunity to encourage dialogue on important workplace topics like creating inclusive team environments, moderated by an employee with expertise in this area.

4. Provide Professional Training

If a new skill can’t be acquired in-house, it’s to your benefit as an employer to offer professional development opportunities outside of the office. Training seminars and certifications are widely offered and cover topics ranging from public speaking to coding languages.

Consider allocating part of your annual budget to offer professional development stipends to employees. Not only is this an attractive benefit that will catch the eye of top talent, but a continued learning stipend will also engage employees and help them gain knowledge that can propel your company further. Doing so will ensure your most skilled employees don’t burnout or feel like they’ve plateaued in their careers. Encourage employees to use these stipends for learning opportunities like courses, certifications, professional memberships and conferences.

If you don’t currently have room in the budget, don’t worry — there are plenty of affordable online learning platforms that range in skill level and subject matter.

5. Establish a Rotational Program

Rotational programs allow employees to work on various projects across departments for several weeks to a few months at a time. It is especially beneficial to new hires as they become acquainted with your company. The program helps new hires understand the different facets of your business and get to know their colleagues.

A rotational program can benefit tenured employees too. Temporarily working in a different department encourages knowledge transfer, which employees can use to improve processes between teams. Employees may also discover new interests or passions that they can nurture into valuable skills. Furthermore, a brief hiatus from their daily responsibilities can challenge and reinvigorate employees, encouraging them to flex different muscles and approach their role from a new perspective.​

6. Encourage Passion Projects

Take time to get to know employees’ interests, then find ways to incorporate those interests into employees’ daily work. Making room for employees to explore their passions can generate more excitement and give employees the confidence to take risks, leading to increased innovation and creativity within the company. 

7. Design Cross-Department Initiatives

To expand employees’ skill sets, expose them to different departments through collaborative projects. For instance, engineers who want to better understand how a product affects a business’ customers could be placed on a team with sales, marketing and customer success personnel. Getting members of various teams to work together exposes each employee to various aspects of a company while putting them in positions where they have to exercise their soft skills like communication and problem-solving.  

8. Offer Skills Workshops 

Emphasize the development of a certain skill by organizing skills workshops. These workshops could cover anything that interests employees, ranging from technical skills like coding to interpersonal skills like emotional intelligence and active listening. Leaders may even decide to set up a series of workshops that build off of each other, giving employees more opportunities to reinforce and apply their new skills and knowledge.

Frequently Asked Questions