Essential Features of Employee Career Development Programs

The software, technology, and techniques necessary to take your program to the next level.

 

72% of learning & development professionals agree: employee career development programs have taken on a more crucial and strategic function than ever at their organization.

As employee career development programs grow more important, it also becomes more critical to ensure these programs are engaging, effective, and focused on what your learners really need to keep up and
excel in the ever-changing workplace.

Today’s employee career development programs that achieve all of this have some essential features in common, namely they are:

Skill-based professional development

What is skill-based professional development

Traditional approaches often focused exclusively on preparing an employee to excel in their current role. Skill-based employee career development programs help that employee develop the hard and soft professional skills they will require to succeed now and — even more crucially — in the future.

Why it’s essential for success

  • Employees crave a way to use their skills: Employees who feel their skills are not being put to good use in their current job are 10x more likely to be looking for a new job.

     

  • The skills required to work are changing: LinkedIn members’ skills for the same occupation changed by an average of 25% between 2015 and 2021. We expect members’ skills to change by about 40% by 2025.

     

  • It’s essential for future business health: 59% of L&D professionals agree that their highest priority following the pandemic is upskilling and reskilling.
illustration of a professional study at home

How to activate skills-based development

Skills-based learning is the future of L&D, and learning platforms are ushering in that future by organizing hard and soft skills into categories and developing course material and learning paths for developing those skills. Some learning platforms offer certification programs, so employees who learn the skill can prove and display it.

illustration of a professional study at home

“Make sure your learning is aligned with business skills. Rather than looking at hours of learning and course completion rates, instead focus on identifying skills that are lacking in your organization. With that alignment and clarity, L&D can create a skill-building program that’s in lock-step with your business strategy.”

Lori Niles-Hofmann

Lori Niles-Hofmann
Senior EdTech Transformation at NilesNolen

Explore skills-based opportunities: LinkedIn’s Career Explorer draws on LinkedIn’s database of skills and related career titles to help professionals understand the skills required for both current and prospective future roles, understand where their skill gaps are, and find new opportunities to learn the skills they need.

Focused on addressing skill gaps

What are skill gaps

Skill gap-focused learning identifies the specific skills both employees and organizations will need to keep up and excel in their role, career, and industries’ futures, then develops long-term career development plans to help them acquire those skills.

Why focus on skills gaps

  • Skill proofing is future proofing: According to the World Economic Forum, the rapid acceleration of automation and economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic will displace 85 million jobs and create 97 million new ones – all of which will require new skills.

     

  • Employees are concerned about it, too: 78% of learners expressed the need for course recommendations based on their skill gaps.

     

  • The skills required for jobs are changing fast: The number of skills required for a single job is increasing by 10% year over year, and more than 30% of the skills needed three years ago will soon be irrelevant.

 

Additional Sources: Chief Learning Officer; Gartner

two people working on a computer

How to address skills gaps

The right skill-building platform can provide a window into how learners are developing their talents. 

Dive into the data: For example, the LinkedIn Learning Hub sits on top of LinkedIn’s Economic Graph. This provides administrators with up-to-date insights on the skills employees need to develop so they and their companies can stay competitive in an ever-changing job market. 

By cross-referencing these needs with their employees’ individual L&D goals and plans, administrators can naturally determine who in their company is a good fit for starting to learn the skills required to fill organizational gaps. Explore the data and see where your team stands.

person studying on a laptop in a park

“Analytics can provide a very clear view where you as a professional have to re-skill and up-skill based on new technologies, or new requirements with your job, and give you this tailored view.”

Ralf Buechsenschuss

Ralf Buechsenschuss
Global Head of Org Design, Analytics and Digitalization at Zurich Insurance

Aligned with employee career paths

What is career path alignment

Career-aligned learning expands your employee career development program’s scope beyond the current role of the learner to focus instead on developing the skills that learners will require throughout their careers.

Why align with career paths

  • It significantly improves retention: 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career, and 60% of US employees who quit their jobs in the past year cited a lack of career development opportunities as a major reason why.

  • Employees are asking for it: “If it is personalized specifically for my interests and career goals” was employees’ second-highest motivation factor for choosing professional development courses, after “if it helps me perform better in my current role.” 

  • Career development attracts new hires: 80% of people seeking employment say they are looking for a company that will help them achieve career growth. 

Additional Sources: Pew Research, Prudential

illustration of someone helping another person up stairs

How to achieve career path alignment

Advanced online learning platforms can cross-reference an individual learner’s stated goals, skills, and career history with the skills developed by other peers and mentors in similar roles and/or industries to help the learner understand the skills they’ll need to accomplish future roles in their chosen career. It becomes very easy for employees to see the benefit.

Learn about changing skills: When you input any job title in LinkedIn’s “Future of Skills” tool, it will tell you how skills have changed, and what new skills workers in this field can build to stay ahead of the changing world of work.

By using the Future of Skills tools, users and L&D professionals can see the skills they will need to develop in order to keep pace in their current role and/or advance to the next step in their career.

illustration of someone studying on a computer

Driven by goal achievement

What is goal-driven learning

Goal-driven learning is similar to, but distinct from, career-aligned learning. Where career-aligned learning focuses specifically on the skills an employee requires to succeed in their current role and get promoted to the next role, goals-based learning takes a longer approach. 

Goal-driven learning is about what your employees ultimately want from their careers, while considering the role L&D could play in that. Beyond pursuing a simple job title, goal-driven learning aims to understand the kind of goals a professional wants to accomplish for their own lifelong needs and interests.

Why focus on learning goals

  • It motivates employees on their own terms: 78% of learners expressed the need for course recommendations based on their career goals.

     

  • It improves engagement, morale, and willingness to learn: 92% of employees who took Unilever’s “Discover Your Purpose” workshop to connect their jobs to the skills they were most interested in had higher engagement levels and felt more ready to learn. 

     

  • It creates lifelong learners: Motivating employees to pursue career goals and interests, rather than only learning what they “need” to, will teach employees how to learn and help inspire them to continue doing it throughout their careers
 
illustration of a person studying and a target with an arrow in the bulleye

How to develop learning goals

One way to begin building a goals-driven employee career development program is simple: figure out what your employee’s goals are. To do that, survey them and ask the following questions:

 

  • Which skills are employees already proficient in?

     

  • Which skills are they most interested in learning?

     

  • Are there any skills they don’t possess but should?

     

  • Which skills do they need to learn to get to the next level?

     

  • Are your employees interested in management or individual-contributor career paths?

     

Based on the results of this survey, choose to develop skills for each employee that match as many of the following criteria as possible:

 

  • The employee doesn’t possess the skill, or doesn’t possess the skill at a competitive level

     

  • The employee is interested in learning the skill(s)

     

  • The employee needs to develop to achieve goals

illustration of two people in a discussion

“When we’re intentional about what we want in our personal lives and can apply that same level of personal commitment to our professional development, this can show up as being more deliberate about setting goals for ourselves and our teams.”

Jodi Atkinson

Jodi Atkinson
Senior Director of Global Learning at Deltek

Start setting goals: LinkedIn Learning allows learners to set weekly learning goals for themselves in addition to their longer-term career and skill-based goals. These goals help learners block off specific amounts of time in their schedules for learning and track their progress toward their overarching goals.

Personalized employee learning

What is personalized learning

As with the relationship between skills-based and skill-gap focused learning, personalized employee career development programs are a natural extension of career and goal-based learning. 

After you understand each learner’s goals and career aspirations, it’s time to design a unique L&D path that can both help them achieve those goals and fill skill gaps at your organization. To manage this, every one of your employee’s career paths will have to be customized to their needs.

Why personalize online learning

  • It improves engagement: Companies that recommend personalized professional development paths on LinkedIn Learning see 69% more hours of learning watched per employee.
 

  • Employees look for guidance: 56% of employees say they would spend more time learning if their manager suggested a course to improve skills.

     

  • Employees are hungry for personalized help: Employees’ number one motivation for wanting to take a professional development course was, “if it helps me stay up to date in my particular field.”
Illustration of a person giving direction to someone at a workstation

How to deliver personalized learning

Today’s online learning platforms can make personalized recommendations for individual users based on their stated goals, roles, previous learning activity, and more.
 
Some platforms can even monitor industry trends and keep track of what other professionals with similar roles are learning in order to help you understand what kind of skills a given individual should be developing.

Make learning relevant: LinkedIn Learning leverages the massive amount of data available on LinkedIn itself to develop a sophisticated understanding of an individual’s role, skills, and skill gaps relative to their peers. 

The system can even cross-reference these skill gaps with the individual user’s goals in order to put together customized recommendations on courses that both fill skill gaps and accomplish the user’s goals.

LinkedIn Learning presents these recommendations in the form of a full path forward to personalized goal fulfillment, giving the user the plan and resources they need to pursue the learning that matters most to them personally.

illustration of someone finishing a certificate on-line

Community-based online learning

Community-based online learning

Community-based learning involves and engages all employees in each other’s career development by providing them opportunities to learn and study together, as well as discuss their individual learning paths.

Why embrace community learning

  • It’s more engaging and effective: L&D pros believe that learning is more engaging when people learn together (86%), and believe employees who learn together are more successful (91%). 

     

  • Social learners spend more time learning: Employees who use LinkedIn Learning’s social features spend 30x more hours learning than those who don’t.

     

  • It creates a sense of belonging… which also fosters engagement: L&D professionals also believe social learning helps create a sense of belonging (92%). Employees who feel a sense of belonging are 5.2x more likely to be engaged at work.

 
illustration of several people studying on computers around a table

How to encourage community-based learning

In addition to providing access to the courses themselves, your learning platform needs to provide learners with the ability to speak to both each other and their instructors, to ask questions, share notes, study together, and talk about what they’ve learned. 

Harness community learning: LinkedIn Learning Hub’s community-based learning uses LinkedIn itself to connect learners with their colleagues, peers, and even experts like the LinkedIn Learning instructors. Users can share their learnings by participating in course-based online chat groups or even posing real-time questions to instructors during or after courses. 

The Learning Hub even gives teams the ability to see each other’s progress to encourage one another or gamify the process of learning more.

illustration of a person participating in a group class on-line

“There’s a social learning element to LinkedIn Learning that makes it quite engaging. Being able to connect with instructors and fellow learners, for example, and having the opportunity to learn from one another via the Q&A feature helps make learning more sticky. It also ingrains a habit of learning in moments of need, which is fundamental to developing a self-directed learning attitude.”

David Hendrick Jr

David Hendrick Jr.
Director of People Development, Centre for Healthcare Innovation at Tan Tock Seng Hospital

Create your essential employee career development programs today

The LinkedIn Learning Hub provides L&D professionals like you with all the tools and resources you need to design customized employee career development programs that fit all of these essential criteria, ensuring the most effective and impactful possible L&D experience for each employee.

And the best part? LinkedIn Learning makes developing these programs easy. See for yourself.

Help your employees develop skills they can use right away.

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