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If you asked your employees if they have ample opportunities for career advancement at your company, what would they tell you?
Would they say they have a lot of career development programs available to them—that they can regularly make time for upskilling and reskilling?
A study from McKinsey found 41% of employees left their jobs because of the lack of career advancement opportunities. But, you in HR and L&D understand this already. In Together’s own report, “Enterprise L&D in 2025: Predictions and Trends”, industry professionals predict lack of career growth is going to be the top cause of turnover next year.
We know that lack of growth is an issue, but addressing that issue can come in many forms.
So, let’s get to work connecting your employees to career advancement programs. In this article, we’re going to explore what career development programs are, how to implement them, and examples of successful companies with career development programs to give you inspiration.
What are career development programs?
Career development programs are plans designed to match employees’ abilities, needs, and long-term career goals to current and future opportunities within an organization. It’s a way to set your employees up for success in your company and along their entire career journey. These plans can include external certifications, attending conferences and seminars, or activities like a peer mentor program, among others.
Usually, career development spans an employee’s entire work life and is meant to be on-the-job training. Academic career development is when employees enroll in professional courses put on by an academic institution. Similarly, bootcamps are short-term career growth programs designed to train employees in specific hard skills. It could be to upskill employees or help them transition to another career path.
Why it’s important to have career development programs
In HR and L&D, you already know that investing in developing talent is a necessity—not just as an exercise in employee retention, but as a way to build a stronger, more engaged, and agile workforce. Training employees effectively is no small feat, but well worth the effort.
Here are just a few of the ways having a career development program for employees benefits your company.
Employee retention
Employee career development is one of the effective strategies to increase retention rates. These programs retain valued employees as long as their personal and career development needs are catered to.
💡 94% of employees would stay at their current company if they invested in their career growth.
Investing in employees’ growth strengthens your employer brand and company culture, earning employee loyalty long term.
Upskilling and reskilling employees
With the right development plan, employees can stay in tune with trends in their roles by reskilling and upskilling to prepare for future roles and needs of your company.
In most cases, this means your company won’t need to hire a new person to fill a role but can
develop a current employee to move into that position instead. This saves hiring costs and onboarding time since the employee already knows the ins and outs of your company.
Leadership development
A career development program prepares employees to be leaders. Depending on the program, you can help them develop their decision-making and cross-functional skills through high-potential leadership programs.
By integrating a leadership development program into your strategy, you’re building a solid leadership pipeline and equipping new and current managers with the skills to lead your company through change and support success.
Successful, real-life career development programs examples
If you’re unsure where to start with your career advancement program, look to companies who’ve seen success.
Here are six real-life examples of career development programs in practice.
1. Marriot International
Marriot heavily invests in their early career development programs and sees a lot of success. Through their hotel internship programs, recent grads can build upon their classroom studies with hands-on learning from industry experts. New or current employees can also take part in the Voyage Leadership Development Program to learn discipline-specific management skills while expanding their professional network.
2. Workday
Workday has a skill-based HR strategy for their employees to find and work towards specific skills. Employees are connected with opportunities to work as part of other teams across the company to learn new skills and perspectives on their career journey. Running since 2021, Workday’s career development program participants have great things to say.
3. Randstad
Randstad is a multinational organization that runs professional mentoring programs for its employees. They were able to measure the turnover rates and employee engagement of participants and saw a 49% reduction in turnover as well as a happier, more driven workforce.
4. Ethena
This is an excellent example of a smaller company that integrates its values into their career development program. Ethena creates in-depth and interactive compliance training for companies of all sizes and makes sure their employees have access to their entire course catalog—from DEI and unconscious bias training, to leadership skill-building, to industry or role-specific skills.
5. Aflac
While known by most for their duck mascot and silly commercials, the insurance company is also known for its career development programs for employees. Aflac’s Career Success Centers are open to all employees, where they set an appointment with a career counselor to explore their career goals and how to achieve them within the company.
Aflac’s career advancement programs boast a wide variety of activities, programs, and events like Career Insights sessions that give employees time with leadership from different areas of the company to learn about the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in that role.
6. Accenture
Investing nearly $1 billion USD in career development programs, this IT and professional services company aims to keep their employees’ skills up to date to meet changing needs. From supporting external credentials like Salesforce and AWS, to providing leadership training programs, to honing into niche industry-specific skillsets, employees from all parts of the company have the opportunities to learn and grow.
There are tons of examples of companies with career development programs that see impressive results. Read more about some of the best company training programs here.
Best practices for building a career development program
Now that you have a better idea of what a career development program is and why you should implement one, let’s cover the how. Here are some strategies to help you implement a successful, impactful career advancement program.
Decide which employees should participate
Do you want the program to serve early-career professionals, high-potential employees training for leadership roles, or underrepresented talent? Explore the different skills, learning formats, and topics needed for each cohort and tailor program content to them.
Have managers and employees co-create development plans
An individual development plan (IDP) is based on an employee's career and personal development needs.
Rather than sifting through a catalog of courses that may not be relevant to them, an IDP creates a personalized approach to helping employees reach their short and long-term career goals and improving job performance.
An IDP is a partnership between managers and employees that involves continuous feedback and preparation.
Pair employees with mentors who will help them grow
Having a workplace mentorship program gives more junior employees a big leg up—and even senior executives in a reverse mentorship.
Career mentors help their mentee better define their goals then guide them through how to achieve them. Integrating a mentoring program into your broader career development program offers better support for employees looking to excel while improving engagement with your company as a whole.
Enhance your LMS with development programs software
Gathering all your career development activities into one place means it’s far easier for your employees to participate and for you to manage your various programs and initiatives.
Using development programs software allows you to bring in different learning formats, all your company and third-party training materials, and manage communications and tasks to build a more comprehensive and interactive career development program.
Put employees on a growth trajectory today
A career development program is not just essential to retention; it’s essential to creating a stronger, future-ready workforce.
These programs help employees improve their skills in their current roles, navigate the corporate ladder (or career lattice), and let them explore all the different paths their career can take.
Making sure you have the tools to support your employees allows them to flourish. Tools like Together’s development programs software helps you create and manage your career advancement programs all in one place, meaning it’s a lot easier for you as the administrator and more convenient for your participants.
Learn more about Together’s development programs software and how it can support your career development program—book a demo today.
