This technique teaches employees the skills required for roles outside their primary function, building operation al flexibility, and supporting succession planning.
Toolkit: A Comprehensive Guide to Development and Training
Employee development and training equip people with the skills they need today and in the future. Give your HR team the tools to build, deliver, and measure programs that close skills gaps, retain top talent, and drive lasting growth.
Most organizations know employee growth matters. They invest in upskilling, coaching, and career development in an effort to build a stronger workforce. But investment alone doesn’t deliver results. Skills gaps can persist, and budget pressures can quietly narrow what programs are capable of accomplishing.
That is why some employers take a more holistic approach that brings together employee development and upskilling — what was historically known as training. Training builds the skills people need to succeed in their current roles. Development strengthens the broader capabilities that prepare them for what comes next.
Although training and development are often linked, they serve distinct purposes. Training equips employees with the knowledge and skills needed for a specific task or their current job. It is focused and immediate. Development goes further. It builds broader competencies, capabilities, and potential that prepare employees for future roles and long-term contributions.
This toolkit gives HR professionals a practical framework to build a stronger development strategy, choose the right training and development methods, and measure program impact.
دراسة جدوى الأعمال
Together, employee development and training function as strategic tools for organizational growth, productivity, and talent retention. They boost performance, reinforce a culture of learning, and help organizations keep top talent in a competitive market. HR professionals are at the center of that effort.
Skills Strategists are organizations that take a consistent, strategic, and targeted approach to learning and development across four key focus areas: Strategic Alignment, Learning Assessment, Learning Design and Delivery, and Processes and Tools.
Skills Strategists are twice as likely, compared to most organizations, to rate the level of skill retention at their organizations as good or excellent (68% versus 34%).
Several reasons make this investment worthwhile:
- Remaining competitive: Employees want employers who upgrade their skills. Organizations compete for talent as much as for market share.
- Addressing skills shortages: Development closes gaps and prepares workers for new opportunities, benefiting both employer and employee.
- Fostering a learning culture: An agile learning environment helps employees adapt quickly to shifting demands and new expectations.
- Reducing turnover: Reasons related to career pathways are the leading cause of turnover, according to Work Institute’s annual analysis of tens of thousands of exit interviews across a range of industries.
- Aligning with strategy: Development tied to organizational needs, such as succession planning, prepares your workforce for what lies ahead.
HR’s best business case for L&D programs connects talent optimization directly to business outcomes, showing exactly how an investment in employee development will yield measurable returns and align with the organization's overarching goals.
نصيحة احترافية
The biggest value in developing employees comes from anticipating future needs before they become urgent problems. A forward-looking approach helps teams prepare for growth, change, and emerging challenges with less disruption.
Personalized L&D: A Smarter Way to Boost Retention
In this episode of SHRM's Honest HR podcast, Elizabeth S. Egan, director of talent management and organizational development at Cerence AI, joins host Nicole Belyna, SHRM-SCP, to explore how personalized learning and development strategies can better support career growth, engagement, and retention.
How to Build an Effective Employee Development Strategy
A strong employee development strategy does not happen by accident. It requires deliberate planning, leadership commitment, and a clear connection to organizational goals. Use these steps to build a program that delivers real results:
- Align development with business goals: Identify the skills your organization will need to meet its long-term goals, not just the ones that fill today's gaps.
- Gain executive support: Ensure executives understand and agree with how development fits into workforce planning, a succession process, or a retention program.
- Involve management: If executives show support, there is a good chance that management will pay attention to employee development and actively champion it across their teams.
- Use a structured learning framework: Apply the 70/20/10 model — 70% on-the-job learning, 20% peer and mentor exposure, and 10% formal training — to embed new skills effectively. Learn more with the SHRM Body of Applied Skills and Knowledge (BASK®), which was developed through a series of large-scale research studies that incorporated the viewpoints of thousands of HR professionals from around the world.
أفضل الممارسات
- Build individual development plans: Work with employees and their managers to set measurable goals that align personal growth with organizational priorities.
- Assess and adjust workloads: Be realistic about what an employee's workload will be while in training and make changes.
- Look for skill adjacencies: Employees may have competencies that are related, in a way that may not seem obvious, to roles employers are seeking to fill.
- Understand what the employee values: Employees often have an intense interest in their own development. Knowing what each employee values and how that relates to their development needs should greatly affect the type of development activities provided for the employee and, ultimately, for the success of such activities.
- Know the desired outcome: Have a clear understanding of exactly which skills will be enhanced by particular employee development initiatives.
- Maintain clear communication: Keep lines of communication open and consistent among employees, managers, and stakeholders throughout the training process.
- Account for global considerations: When designing and delivering programs, factor in cultural, linguistic, geographic, and time zone differences to make training accessible, relevant, and effective for a distributed workforce. An LMS with multilingual support and regional compliance tracking helps organizations maintain consistent learning standards across borders.
موارد SHRM
- How-To Guide: How to Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis
- Introduction to Organizational and Employee Development
- How-To Guide: AI Prompting for Employee Development Plans: A Complete Guide
- مجموعة أدوات: تحسين الاحتفاظ بالموظفين وتقليل معدل دورانهم
- Q&A: Common Pitfalls and Solutions in Learning and Development
نصيحة احترافية
Effective programs provide ongoing support, learning opportunities, and resources, encouraging leaders to continually refine their skills and stay up to date with changing business landscapes.
Training/Upskilling Methods
The right training and upskilling depends on your workforce, your budget, and your strategic goals. From flexible online platforms to structured in-person programs and emerging technologies, each method offers distinct advantages for closing skills gaps and preparing employees for what comes next. When the method matches the need, companies get stronger results and a more engaged workforce.
No single method works for every situation. The most effective strategies blend several approaches, then measure outcomes to refine the program over time. Consider a combination of these approaches when shaping a development strategy:
- Web-based learning platforms: Learning management systems (LMSs) give employees flexible access to training anytime, making it easier to scale development across dispersed teams and busy schedules.
- Assessment centers: An assessment center is not necessarily a physical site, as the term might suggest, but a program of tools and exercises designed to assess an employee's or job candidate's suitability in relation to a particular role. Centers may be used for selection or development purposes.
- Corporate universities: Internal, structured learning academies tie training directly to an organization's strategy.
- Emerging tech-enabled development: Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, chatbots, and gamification personalize the learning experience, boost engagement, and prepare workforces to collaborate effectively with the technologies reshaping their roles.
Experiential Development Approaches
Experiential development approaches give employees the opportunity to build skills through direct practice rather than learning passively through instruction. These methods embed learning within the flow of real work, which can make making new capabilities more likely to stick and translate into measurable performance gains.
These developmental projects place employees in challenging situations that push them beyond their current capabilities, accelerating growth, and preparing high-potential talent for expanded leadership roles.
This vertical expansion layers in higher-level responsibilities, greater autonomy, or more complex decision-making, deepening both engagement and capability. But make these short-term experiences and avoid expanding responsibilities without increasing status or pay.
This observational approach allows an employee to observe a colleague in a different role or function, gaining firsthand exposure to workflows, decisions, and challenges outside their own day-to-day experience.
This practice moves employees through a series of roles or departments over a set period — typically three to nine months — helping them develop a broader organizational perspective and a more versatile skill set.
Other Development Methods
Beyond formal training programs, organizations use a range of targeted methods to develop talent and build internal capacity. Together with experiential approaches, they form a comprehensive approach to workforce development.
This is a personalized, one-on-one development method tied to a specific business objective, such as improving leadership effectiveness or strengthening communication skills. It unfolds over time and requires organizational commitment: a clear plan, qualified coaches, and follow-up evaluation to gauge impact. More than 1 in 5 executives (22%) in SHRM's L&D Executives: Priorities and Perspectives research consider coaching their top priority over the next year.
Effective programs match participants based on skills and development needs, outline measurable goals, designate minimum time commitments, monitor relationship progress, hold both parties accountable, and connect mentoring directly to talent management strategy.
This model assesses employees across two dimensions: current performance and future potential. HR professionals commonly use it in succession planning to evaluate the talent pool, identify emerging leaders, and inform the design of individual development plans.
Succession-oriented tools identify long-range organizational needs and cultivate internal talent over a one-to-three-year period. The goal is to prepare — not preselect — employees for future roles. Organizations of all sizes benefit from maintaining a structured succession pipeline.
موارد SHRM
- How-To Guide: How to Identify Upskilling Opportunities Through Training Needs Assessments
- اختبار: اختبر معلوماتك حول تنمية المواهب
- Q&A: HR Budget Planning Considerations That Drive Real Value
- مجموعة الأدوات: بناء مسارات وسلالم وظيفية ديناميكية للموظفين
- Q&A: Is Job-Swapping the Same as Cross-Training?
- اختبار: هل تدرك شركتك أهمية تنمية المهارات القيادية؟
- Q&A: Implementing a Job Rotation Program
- قالب عرض برنامج التوجيه
- الدليل الإرشادي: كيفية بناء برنامج إرشادي ناجح
- How-To Guide: How to Connect with Your Ideal Mentor for Your HR Career Goals
- Q&A: What Is a 9-Box Grid?
نصيحة احترافية
When making promotion decisions, give preference to employees who completed training and performed well. A promotion should be one of the rewards for their efforts.
Have a question about development and training?
القوالب والأدوات
Use these templates from SHRM to boost your company’s development and training. These ready-to-use resources can help you put a plan into motion today.
نموذج
نموذج تحليل الاحتياجات التدريبية
Build targeted training programs that drive measurable business outcomes.
نموذج
Professional Development Request
Support employee growth and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
السياسة
سياسة التناوب الوظيفي
Access guidelines for structuring rotation programs that support organizational goals.
نموذج
Individual Skills Inventory
Gain insights into employee strengths and build a more agile, high-performing workforce.
نموذج
خطة التطوير الوظيفي للموظفين
Strengthen retention and align employee goals with business objectives.
السياسة
Professional Development Reimbursement
Ensure clarity on reimbursement limits, approval, and documentation.
Common Employee Development Challenges
Organizations invest real money in learning and development — yet results rarely match the spending. SHRM's L&D Executives Benchmarking data shows the median employee logs just eight hours of learning per year, and only 25% complete any nonmandatory training. Here's what HR teams need to know about some of the biggest obstacles to having successful programs:
- Accountability gaps: When no one is responsible for development outcomes, training defaults to optional. How to address the challenge: Build development milestones directly into performance review cycles so team growth becomes a shared, measurable expectation.
- Funding constraints: Budget and resource limitations rank as the top functional challenge for L&D leaders. How to address the challenge: Reframe L&D as a performance investment by pairing training costs with turnover and productivity data. Numbers-backed proposals earn faster leadership buy-in.
- Inconsistent execution: A program that thrives in one department can fall flat in another if training is delivered unevenly or lacks role-specific relevance across teams.
- How to address the challenge: For higher-budget organizations, use an LMS to standardize delivery frameworks and completion tracking, while giving individual teams the flexibility to adapt content to their specific functions.
- For lower-budget organizations, rely on manager-led training, peer learning, and simple tracking tools such as shared checklists or spreadsheets.
نصيحة احترافية
Ensure career paths are visible and achievable. As an example, one restaurant chain posted a “Ladder to Success” chart in every store, showing employees how reliability, service, and leadership lead to advancement.
قياس الأثر
Strong development programs deserve strong evidence. LMSs address this directly, delivering real-time visibility into completion rates, assessment scores, learner engagement, and skill certifications. SHRM research demonstrates that data-driven L&D strategies consistently outperform intuition-based approaches across both retention and performance outcomes. Other useful metrics include:
- Participation rate: Number of eligible employees who enrolled in or attended training.
- Completion rate: Percentage of employees who finished the assigned programs.
- Time to completion: How long it takes learners to complete required training.
- Knowledge gain: Pre- and post-training assessment scores.
- Internal mobility: Promotions, lateral moves, or stretch assignments following development programs.
- Retention rate: Whether trained employees stay longer than untrained employees
- Manager effectiveness: Feedback on whether managers are reinforcing learning through coaching and follow-up.
- ROI or cost efficiency: Cost per learner, cost per completion, or savings from reduced seat time and fewer external training expenses.
نصيحة احترافية
Make the long-term case. Many managers are focused on executing current-year results, but workforce development typically runs on a longer time frame. Instead, track skill growth over time.
الاعتبارات القانونية
Employee development programs offer clear value, but they also carry legal risk. A working knowledge of the following areas will help protect both employees and organizations.
التمييز
When employees are excluded from development opportunities — such as mentoring programs — those employees may view the exclusion as discrimination based on their protected characteristics such as race, religion, and others. To reduce this risk, familiarize yourself with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other nondiscrimination laws. Consistent, merit-based criteria for access to development opportunities help demonstrate that your development programs are fair and provide equal opportunity to qualified employees.
الانتقام
Retaliation claims can arise when an employee engages in a legally protected activity such as reporting harassment or discrimination, participating in an investigation, or raising concerns about inappropriate workplace behavior and then loses the chance to participate in a development program. In that situation, the employee could allege that the organization retaliated illegally.
Pay close attention to how broadly the courts define retaliatory conduct. In Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted an expansive view of “materially adverse" treatment. Under this standard, even seemingly minor actions — ignoring an employee or giving that person the cold shoulder — may be enough to support a legal claim. Train managers to recognize this risk and treat all employees consistently, particularly after protected activity.
Use of Copyrighted Materials
Employers should be aware that using other people’s training content without permission can land them in court. Misuse is particularly easy when someone else's training material is just a click away.
If material is only “substantially similar” to other sources, that similarity is still enough to generate a copyright infringement claim. Copyright laws do permit the use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances, allowing fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. But employers should take care to learn about and adhere to copyright laws as they relate to training materials.
Payment for Training Time
As a general rule, training time counts as work time, which means nonexempt employees must be compensated for it under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Training time is exempt from pay only when all the following conditions apply:
- Attendance takes place outside regular work hours.
- الحضور طوعي.
- The employee performs no productive work during the training.
- The training is not designed to make the employee more proficient in the individual's present job.
If even one condition is not met, the employer must pay nonexempt employees for the training time. Review training practices against these criteria to stay compliant and avoid costly wage and hour disputes.
نصيحة احترافية
Log every training activity in your LMS or human resource information system so you have a single, searchable source of truth for who learned what, when, and why.
نصائح الخبراء
Take advantage of these SHRM resources to get more expert insights related to development and training.
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