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What do exceptional companies all have in common? They recognize that developing their workforce is their greatest competitive advantage.
In fact, according to The Readiness Index,
“Having opportunities to learn is the biggest workplace driver of readiness in the US.”
While development programs are usually focused on training employees, we’ve seen hundreds of companies accelerate employee development through initiatives like:
- Development plan tracks
- Mentoring programs
- Employee connection programs
- Upskilling/reskilling
- Employee resource groups (ERGs)
- Career pathing
As the labor market grows increasingly competitive, organizations with robust employee development programs, like the ones we’ve highlighted here, will stand out to applicants and help companies build a talent pipeline in the years to come.
Why your company needs an employee development program
From career to development to employee satisfaction, there are many reasons why companies take time to run an employee development program:
- Upskilling and reskilling employees
- Leadership and management training
- Digital transformation and skill expansion
- Bridging the confidence and readiness gap
- Employee performance support
- Diversity, equity and inclusion
- Improving the success of internship and returnship programs
- Increasing connectedness of teams
Through employee development programs, organizations have been able to do more for their employees. And it pays off. Employees that go through a development program have higher retention rates and engagement levels.
Simply put, employees want more from the places they work, namely career development, long-term growth, better pay, and greater well-being. And you can use employee development programs to engage, retain, and invest in your team members.
What sets exceptional employee development apart?
Most development programs only cover the basics: online reading materials or courses, on-the-job training sessions, and once-a-month meetings. But corporate e-learning alone isn’t enough.
Organizations need to go beyond, providing employees with the tools to do their jobs and also helping them feel challenged, motivated, and ready to take on new endeavors.
Companies with the best training programs do this by focusing on areas that benefit the business and the employee, such as:
- Employee retention and job satisfaction
- DEIB initiatives that promote a positive work environment
- Visibility of minority employees for leadership opportunities
- Fresh perspectives from junior employees for executives
- Retention of Millennial and Gen Z employees
- Feedback and evaluation to further improve the program
- Support for remote and distributed teams
Training and development programs examples
Let’s look at a few examples of how companies have created and managed employee development programs.
1. Heineken
When surveyed, 86% of Heineken senior leaders wanted to connect with junior employees—the next generation—to gain new skills and experiences. This led to Heineken running a reverse mentoring program where junior employees act as mentors to senior leaders and executives. Such a program aims to provide leadership a new perspective on the future of work and areas for growth.
Additionally, Heineken also runs a global diversity and inclusion program. This program is geared toward empowering colleagues to practice inclusion and embrace the diversity of countries the company operates in. When creating the program, Pascale Thorre, Heinken’s Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion Head, conducted a round of 45 introductory interviews to understand how inclusive employees thought the company was and what could to make it more inclusive.
The goal then was to create a program that focused on the “potential needs of [their] people across the full five layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” This meant keeping in mind needs associated with physiology, belonging, self-actualization, self-esteem, and safety in mind.
“Inclusion starts with open and honest communication with everyone in your company … After all, Inclusion can translate differently in different environments and for diverse people.” – Pascale Thorre, Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion Head at Heineken
2. City National Bank
City National Bank has been named one of the ‘Best Employers for Women’ by Forbes. CEO Kelly Coffey was named one the Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance by American Banker. Both honors recognized City National’s employee resource groups and DEI initiatives.
Within these initiatives, the bank hosts a colleague resource group (CRG) called The Black Colleague Alliance (BCA). Their mission: connecting and empowering Black colleagues to thrive as they “climb toward Black excellence.”
Not only does this CRG support Black employees, the BCA also engages in community outreach. Their programs include financial education, community events, and civic engagements that give Black professionals the tools they need to succeed as individuals and small business owners.
Other notable resources include sections of their site geared toward underserved populations, such as women and minorities, plus online resources geared toward business owners.
3. Cooley
Cooley, a global law firm, has been recognized as one of the Best Law Firms for Women and Diversity a whopping 12 times.
They also created a virtual mentoring program—called Cooley Academy Mentoring Program (CAMP)—geared towards improving their onboarding process. The purpose behind this program is to pair new employees with experienced individuals and bring them up to speed more efficiently.
Through this program, mentors get to teach, train, and support new hires through mentoring sessions, and prepare them for more complex work. The company used reporting tools to better understand how mentoring relationships were performing through mentorship progress and feedback.
Cooley also mentions their commitment to professional development and mentorship on its website’s careers page.
4. Randstad
Randstad, a Dutch multinational HR consulting firm, runs a large-scale global mentoring program. Through this program, they were able to study employee engagement and turnover rates — of those in the program versus those who did not participate.
By paying closer attention to employee engagement, Randstad provided employees with development and support and reduced turnover rates. Employees who participated in the mentoring program were 49% less likely to leave Randstad.
5. Cruise Automation
Cruise Automation cares deeply about internal career development. They want to attract top talent and nurture them to grow further within the company.
Through their training and mentorship programs, they were able to accelerate employee development by matching new hires with experienced employees. They used templated mentoring agendas with guiding questions, to-do tasks, links to further reading, and other resources so that teams could have meaningful conversations about skills and goals.
After all, a great mentor-mentee match can lead to career-changing opportunities.
6. Amazon
Amazon runs multiple employee training programs under the Amazon Technical Academy to prepare nontechnical employees to move into software engineering careers. These training programs will help employees feel confident and take on different roles at Amazon and also in other industries. One such program is Associate2Tech where they will train front-line employees to move into technical roles, even if they have no previous IT experience. All training is voluntary.
Regarding fleshing out Amazon’s training program, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of HR says,
“We think it's important to invest in our employees, and to help them gain new skills and create more professional options for themselves.”
They’re also really great at promoting their development efforts. They increased overall ad spend by 30% from 2021 to 2022. For 2020-2021, they spent $69.88 million on recruitment advertising across social media, streaming, and more. And a lot of those ads promoted their professional development programs.
7. Chipotle
Every single year, some fast food brands lose more than an entire workforce. That means they’re constantly scrambling to staff their stores, leaving them less time to focus on achieving their strategic goals.
Chipotle is attempting to buck the trend by betting big on employee development.
In 2018, the company began reinvesting more than one-third of anticipated savings from tax law changes into its employees.
And since the start of the pandemic, Chipotle enhanced its employee development plans by adding more than 5,500 remote courses, covering topics as diverse as business, tech, and wellness.
This move is part of a wider initiative that saw the chain introduce an ERG called United Network of Influencers Furthering Inclusion and Ethnic Diversity. The group’s goal is to promote an equal opportunities approach to career growth and development, thereby helping Chipotle build a discrimination and inequality-free working environment.
Key components of the program include:
- Mentoring for minority employees
- Quarterly training sessions to promote workplace diversity and inclusion (D&I)
- Virtual roundtable events featuring high-profile speakers and panels
Discussing the company’s efforts, Chief Diversity, Inclusion and People Officer, Marissa Andrad said in a press release:
“Our employees are seeking real connection more than ever before, and it's our responsibility to cultivate an environment where they can continue to thrive and pursue their passions with like-minded co-workers, even in a virtual setting.”
8. Marriott International
Marriott International has been consistently named one of Asia Pacific’s best employers, with much of its success tracing back to its focus on employee development.
“Marriott International is a people-first company,” says Natasha Rasheed, Area Director of Human Resources for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. “We believe in taking care of our associates, so they in turn take care of our guests. It’s embedded in our DNA.”
The company’s employee development plans are designed to attract and retain a loyal team committed to the core values of excellence and service. It offers two development programs:
- The Global Voyage Leadership Development program, intended to help recent university graduates
- The Marriott Development Academy (MDA), aimed at helping aspiring managers acquire the soft skills required for leadership roles
Combined, those programs have helped Marriott International fill more than 55% of leadership vacancies within the Australian market with internal candidates.
Not only that, but the company fosters close relationships with universities to help it attract top talent at a young age. It also places substantial focus on D&I, whether through empowering female leaders or by ensuring local populations can access its training and development initiatives. And Marriott’s L&D program is published publicly.
9. Urban Company
Urban Company is India’s largest home services marketplace, with a platform that helps customers book everything from plumbers and appliance repairers to beauty services and personal trainers.
Much like the vast majority of organizations, Urban Company was forced to radically rethink its systems of working during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Its first major call was to shift its entire workforce to remote working; a huge challenge for any organization, let alone one with 1,300 office-based employees.
However, Urban Company has always been happy to find innovative solutions and implement creative workflows.
With these in place, the brand’s marketing team was able to slash creative production costs by 85%. And it took the same ambitious approach to learning and development.
The Urban Company leadership quickly realized employees still needed to be able to acquire new skills and learnings even while working away from the office, so it launched its own learning and development platform, Urban Academy.
The company leveraged internal expertise to build programs covering a wide range of topics, including:
- Excel Skills (basic, intermediate, and expert)
- Leadership
- How to give feedback
- Problem-solving
- SQL
As interest grew across individual teams and departments, they were able to bolster the program by adding 25 new instructors.
Furthermore, all that internal knowledge was supplemented by a regular series of two-hour talks featuring key leaders from various industries.
10. Spotify
Spotify attributes its success in attracting and retaining talent, as well as its overall growth, to fostering a culture of continuous learning. With a valuation of $73.65 billion, the streaming giant adopts a “growth is not linear” philosophy for career development.
The company supports flexible career paths through initiatives such as:
- Internal mobility programs: Employees can engage in Gigs, Job Swaps, and Permanent Moves, emphasizing skill development over job titles.
- Career support: Regular career mapping discussions with managers, along with career coaching and mentoring, help employees build transferable skills.
- Data-driven learning: Spotify leverages data to identify skill gaps and deliver targeted learning opportunities.
- Cross-functional growth opportunities: Initiatives like an internal job board and Career Week encourage internal roles and cross-departmental collaboration.
Together, these development programs for employees foster a culture of continuous growth and development.
Types of training and development
Development Programs
The goal of a development program is to align the growth of individual employees with your organization’s strategic objectives. Development programs can come in all shapes and sizes, including:
- Leadership development: Prepare potential and current leaders for higher responsibilities
- Technical skills training: Equip employees with specific skills needed to perform effectively
- Succession planning: Prepare future leaders and key roles to ensure business continuity
- Career development: Help employees plan and navigate their career within the organization
- Soft skills development: Improve interpersonal skills, communication, collaboration, and EQ
- DEIB: Foster a diverse and inclusive workplace
- Onboarding: Help new hires get acclimated to the organization, culture, and their roles
- Interns: Help interns find their way and build their careers
- Employee wellness: Support the physical and mental well-being of employees
Development programs software can help streamline and personalize your corporate learning programs, ensuring your development program succeeds at boosting the skills, knowledge, and competencies of your employees.
Mentorship programs
Mentorship programs are a great way to aid and accelerate learning at work. They provide employees with the opportunity to learn from a seasoned leader and become more competent because of it.
Start employee mentoring programs by getting leaders, stakeholders, and employees on board. Choose a type of mentoring (1-on-1, group, traditional, reverse, and so on) that fits your goals and needs. Once you decide on the type of program, create relevant pairings between mentors and mentees.
If you’re trying to pair employees at scale (think 100+ employees), you’ll likely want to use a pairing algorithm that automates the registration and matching process.
Colleague connection programs
Peer-to-peer training is another effective way to bring more of a collaborative or social aspect to employee development.
Technical skills like how to code, follow a procedure, or execute a specialized task can be learned through a course or by following available documentation or internal blogs. But to master these complex skills, employees will benefit more from working alongside a peer mentor. Likewise, they can also learn more abstract skills like how to handle conflict better, balance work and life, or be a better leader.
Level-up your employee development program with Together
If you’re planning to work on your own employee development program, remember that it takes more than just building a training program and assigning courses or tasks. Employees must feel empowered to learn for your L&D efforts to pay off.
A development program leveraging Together's software can help you create an intentional and mindful space for employee growth and development.
Together helps organizations deliver world-class development programs for employees, like new manager training, high-potential talent programs, new employee onboarding, and more. With tools like employee matching, task automation, event & content hosting, and more, Together enables L&D leaders to plan their organization’s development strategy all in one place.
Book a call with our team to see how we can help you build an exceptional development program.
