Employee Training and Development: How to Create a Winning Plan for Your Team

Employee training and development gives staff the skills they need to thrive in their roles while delivering a slew of other benefits for both employees and employers. For instance, 50% of workers surveyed in the United States and United Kingdom say that having opportunities for professional development improved their happiness at work. Additionally, solid training programs help staff springboard into new or higher internal positions, saving on hiring costs and strengthening your business, among other benefits.

The key to realizing these advantages is creating a quality employee development plan — but that’s easier said than done. Putting together a truly successful employee training plan is a complex, nuanced process that requires lots of data, planning, and collaboration to understand what employees want and how that intersects with your business needs.

To that point, according to the 2023-24 SHRM State of the Workplace report, HR representatives at 53% of the companies surveyed reported upskilling or reskilling the current workforce as a top priority for 2024 — but a mere 21% were very or “extremely effective at upskilling or reskilling” their employees in 2023. According to that same report, while HR representatives surveyed gave an average B- score to their organizations’ training programs, U.S. employees gave an average C score.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the steps businesses can take to create training plans for their employees, why those plans matter, the right tools to use to build your plan, and more.

In This Article

How to create an employee development plan

Employee development plans differ by industry and organizational structure. However, these five core steps are an excellent starting point:

1. Assess your training needs

2. Determine the type of training plan

3. Establish the objectives of the plan

4. Create or select training materials

5. Outline metrics to measure success

Let’s walk through each of these steps and how you can put them into practice at your company in more detail. 

1. Assess your training needs

First, you’ll need to take a close look at what kind of training and development your team needs to succeed in their respective roles. The larger your organization is, the more complex this can become. A good way to start tackling this step is to leverage a skills ontology — a map of necessary business skills and how they relate to each other — to help you understand what professional abilities your staff already have and what would be helpful for them to learn.

To get a good handle on what skills you might need to include in your ontology and training program, think about the needs of your business. What abilities and attributes does a team member need to succeed in their department? Examine all of the data you have available to you to help you pinpoint these skills:

• Performance reviews. Study recent reviews for each department to see what skills are listed and what feedback managers are providing to their direct reports. Are there themes in what managers are asking of their direct reports?

• Open positions. Analyze the job descriptions from roles that haven’t been filled yet. What are the key requirements? Are they already part of your training, or are there competencies you don't have any programs for?

• Employee surveys. If your organization asks for feedback from employees directly, you’re sitting on a goldmine. Look for themes in what kinds of training and development employees are hungry for and take note.

Of course, manually hunting down this data can quickly balloon into a drawn-out process — a slowdown most companies can’t afford. Today, talent and people managers who successfully drive learning and development (L&D) use AI-driven workplace intelligence tools to sift through employee data trends and generate observations.

2. Determine the type of training plan

Once you know your training needs, it’s time to draw up a plan. Remember, you may need to create unique plans for specific departments or for individual employees. To figure out what type of training plan will be most effective, consider the following:

• Tenure. How long has the employee been at the company? Senior team members will require more complex or high-level training.

• Performance. Are the employee’s skills entry level? Or are they already a whiz at day-to-day tasks? This will determine whether they need a refresher on basic skills or if they’re ready to learn something new.

• Job responsibilities. Are they handling more basic tasks, or does their role require them to own projects and team performance? Their responsibilities will directly impact which skills are most important for them to develop.

• Career goals. Does the employee have aspirations to move into management? Do they want to make a lateral move? Or are they happy to stay in the weeds of the day-to-day tasks their current role involves?

For instance, an analyst who is new to the job may need more technical training on more foundational skills, like using a particular software, in order to complete daily tasks with less or no oversight. However, a senior analyst who has managerial aspirations might need to develop their soft skills, like communication and conflict resolution, so they can one day lead their team.

Organization- or team-wide employee training might include product, safety and compliance, or DEI training. Some of these training initiatives might require a formal, multi-day structure, like an offsite where employees can wholly focus on the material.

For other types of training, it makes perfect sense to let the employee fit learning in wherever they can during any downtime. Think about what kind of learners your employees are and how complex and lengthy the training will be when deciding how to format different employee development programs.

3. Set goals and objectives

Training and development plans should have clear goals for your business and employees. Driving sales, decreasing accidents, and boosting employee retention are all worthwhile training goals. Identify metrics that connect to these goals, discuss them with your staff, and adopt the HR technology needed to track them in real time.

Say your objective is to achieve higher employee retention rates. Take a look at your current rates, define a reasonable increase in retention based on benchmarks for comparable companies, and communicate those goals to HR professionals and managers.

Related Resource: How to Build an Effective Career Pathing Framework

4. Develop the right training materials

Once your pre-planning is done, it’s time to create your training materials. First, consider whether the training is best handled in person or virtually, as this will determine the kinds of materials available to you. In person training lets instructors and learners have deeper interactions, offers the opportunity for hands-on experience, and provides accountability that may be lacking in an online environment. But it lacks the flexibility, wealth of available materials, and ease of administration that comes with remote learning.

After you’ve decided between these two categories, you’ll have to actually create or select training materials that match the objective you’ve set and suit your employees’ preferred learning styles. Options include online courses, off-site seminars, and employee-led training sessions in the workplace.

When diving into the specifics, don’t forget that you’ll need to provide both trainers and trainees with the necessary resources. This may include laptops or other devices, transportation, or simply a conference room.

Finally, look for opportunities to engage your workforce by personalizing their learning experiences. If you’re using online learning materials, develop individualized learning paths that align with the employee’s interests and career goals, while still meeting the training objectives you’ve set.

Or, if you have a trusted professional with years of relevant experience in house, establishing a mentorship relationship or scheduling some shadowing sessions could be just what employees need to understand and complete the other materials they’ve been assigned.

5. Create metrics and measure success

As noted above, to truly know if your employee development initiatives are working, you need to define and track the right metrics These are some of the most common metrics companies use to track training success:

• Participation rate. The more employees per department or role who take part in the training, the better your odds are of seeing improvements in their skills.

• Completion rate. More employees successfully completing training leads to greater uptake of the material covered.

• Improvement of skills trained. Comparing data from pre- and post-training assessments, you’ll be able to measure competency levels among staff.

• Internal mobility. If your employees are interested in making lateral moves to other departments, measuring internal mobility post-training can indicate how successful your training efforts were.

• Employee retention rates. If your organization’s goal is to engage your team and keep them around, retention rate is a great metric to measure your program’s success.

The benefits of employee development plans

We’ve already briefly touched on some of the benefits of investing in training for your staff, like higher retention rates and employee happiness. Let’s take a closer look to get a sense for how impactful employee development plans can truly be.

A more talented workforce

Taking time to train workers should result in talent that can handle the requirements of their position better and more independently. Those who’ve received training can then guide junior or struggling employees in turn. Talented team members are also poised to advance within the company — a big boon since more than three in five workers say they’d search for a new role if their company didn’t allow position changes.

Better employee experience

Now more than ever, employees want companies to invest in them and provide learning opportunities. In fact, 80% of people surveyed in the 2024 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report said learning adds purpose to their work. By building out a thorough employee development plan, organizations ensure staff are engaged and happy.

Higher productivity

In a 2022 survey conducted by TalentLMS and SHRM, 80% of employees responded that workplace training positively impacted their productivity. Increased productivity means organizations see more work done with the same amount of resources.

Greater retention

In an age where employees — especially millennials and Gen Z — are likely to job-hop, employee retention is a top concern for businesses. In fact, according to the 2024 LinkedIn report, 90% of employers are worried about employee retention rates and see training opportunities as the top solution.

On the flip side, a 2022 SHRM survey found that 76% of employees reported being more likely to stay with a company that offered some sort of continuous training program. Indeed, according to that same LinkedIn report, companies saw a 57% increase in employee retention rates after providing learning programs for their staff. Long story short: employee training ups your chances of keeping your best talent.

Stronger talent acquisition

Investing in employee training helps your business attract new talent as well. In a 2019 survey from The Execu|Search Group, a whopping 86% of respondents said they’d leave for a company that offered more training opportunities. Clearly, having a solid employee development plan is an important cornerstone to attracting the right talent. And strong talent acquisition goes hand-in-hand with strong talent management.

Types of employee training plans

We’ve already mentioned a few different types of training plans (DEI, safety and compliance, etc.), but there are other types of plans that an organization might use with their staff. Some of the more common ones include:

• Leadership training. Being an effective leader requires skills that people don’t often learn and hone in more junior positions. That means many new managers need training in leadership skills like conflict resolution, delegation, and relationship building. Leadership training can take the form of virtual seminars, live workshops or internal mentorship programs.

• Technical training. Training employees on day-to-day tasks will look different depending on the role or industry. For some positions, like cybersecurity analysts, a yearly certification or re-certification program could be an option. For a manufacturing worker, guided, in-person training on specific equipment makes sense.

• Soft skills training. All employees can benefit from building soft skills in areas like communication, conflict management, and teamwork. These training initiatives can include everything from a series of online videos and quizzes about good customer service practices to a company-wide presentation on task prioritization and time management.

Examples of employee training plans

Now that we’ve covered all of the basics, let’s take a look at some real-world examples of successful employee training and development plans different companies have used with their staff.

This Fortune 500 company puts employees first

One prominent Fortune 500 company needed a better way to encourage their staff members to make lateral and vertical moves without jumping to another employer. To do that, the company utilized an Intelligent Talent Experience platform to rapidly build a career architecture with skill mapping for all their roles.

Leveraging AI-driven ontologies, leaders charted out a robust job architecture and built more than 1,500 career paths for their staff. As a result, this organization improved key metrics, including employee satisfaction, employee productivity, and employee retention.

Amazon commits to upskilling at scale

Amazon is fully leaning into providing training and upskilling for its massive workforce. By 2025, the e-commerce giant wants to grant free education and professional development to more than 300,000 of its employees. In fact, since 2012, more than 110,000 Amazon workers received training or upskilling in areas ranging from commercial truck driving and nursing to computer-aided design and aircraft maintenance.

SEI focuses on internal mobility

When SEI, a U.S.-based financial services and technology company, needed to improve their internal mobility metrics, they relied on an Intelligent Talent Experience platform to get there. With the help of this solution, SEI created a robust internal job portal that connected open positions with career pathing, training, and upskilling programs that could help employees land those new positions. The result? After just three months of the portal going live, more than 1,500 employees applied for another internal position.

How Phenom supports employee training and development

A lot goes into creating a successful employee development program: determining the training your workers need, developing training materials, and setting reasonable, measurable goals. But the benefits—like more engaged staff, higher productivity, and cost savings—underscore how crucial these programs are to sustained business success.

Creating a strong employee training program is easier with Phenom. Data-driven AI tools present employee skill gaps and other data in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. Leaders can then build personalized professional development plans that align with employee personas and career paths to help staff realize their long-term potential.

Check out our latest research on the emerging and declining skills that could impact your business in 2024 to understand where to focus your development efforts for future needs or book a demo and get started today.