Your HR team has a dedicated L&D budget. There’s an online course library and bi-monthly training seminars. However, when several of your highest-performing employees quit, they tell HR they weren’t growing. They didn’t see a future at your organization.
What happened?
Organizations can invest in learning and development resources, but if those programs don’t connect to career development for employees, people may still perceive a lack of opportunity.
In this blog, we explore why employee career development is so closely linked to retention, where organizations fall short in employee development programs, and how HR can connect learning opportunities to the career growth employees crave.
TL;DR
The problem: Employers can offer video courses and seminars while employees still struggle to see how those resources will help their careers.
Why it matters: Employees want to grow and advance. If they can’t see internal opportunities, they may start looking elsewhere.
A number to remember: According to Work Institute, Career Development has been the number one reason employees have quit for over a decade.
What most organizations miss: Not all employees want the same career. Some may want to become senior individual contributors, while others may be looking for management. Useful career development starts with understanding what each person wants.
What HR can do now: Make internal opportunities easier to find, give managers better tools for career conversations, and connect learning resources to specific goals.
What is employee career development?
Employee career development is the process of helping current employees grow their skills, responsibilities, and knowledge so that they can progress in their careers. Training, mentoring, stretch assignments, and coaching are all important aspects of career development, but they must connect to an employee’s individual career goals. In other words, employees must see how those learning resources will help them advance from their current role into the next one.
Career development is not the same as training
Training is a type of employee development that encompasses any activity that helps an employee learn or gain mastery in a new skill. Career development is a longer-term direction. While training focuses on learning new skills and information, career development in the workplace focuses on growth and gaining new experience specifically to advance one’s career. An organization can offer hundreds of courses without helping an employee understand how those learning resources help them advance in their careers.
Career development versus employee development
Employee development is the organizational practice of improving employees’ capabilities, including hard skills training, performance improvement, leadership development, and soft skill development. Career development within a company uses employee development tools and strategies to drive internal mobility.
Why career development is important for retention
For the past decade, Work Institute has observed the same unchanging trend: Employees’ top reason for leaving is a lack of Career Development. Similarly, LinkedIn’s 2025 Workforce Learning Report found that although providing learning opportunities is organizations’ number one retention strategy, only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months.
While you can’t always control every reason an employee leaves, you can influence internal mobility by making roles visible and prioritizing current employees when recruiting, making career development one of the most effective ways to reduce voluntary turnover.
Why organizations that offer employee development still lose people
Here are some common mistakes organizations can make with their employee development programs:
A course catalog is not a career path
Many organizations give employees access to a generic course catalog. However, it’s more difficult (and meaningful) to tell employees, “Here are the directions you could take from your current role. Here’s what each role requires, and here’s what you need to develop to get there.”
In addition, giving access to a course catalog doesn’t mean a career path is visible. While employees will always value things like employee appreciation and mentorship, knowing what opportunities are available and how to progress toward them is the only way to provide transparent career development.
Generic development fails for the same reason generic onboarding fails
One employee may happily stay in the same role for a couple of years if it means taking on more challenging assignments. Another might see management as the only path forward, and they may quickly get bored without additional responsibilities. Giving both employees the exact same learning resources doesn’t account for those differences. So, determine what kind of progress will make your high-performing employees happy and satisfied so they keep building a career at your company.
Nobody is having development conversations
Sometimes, the missing piece is simply a lack of intentional conversation. Gallup found that 45% of employees who voluntarily left a job said neither a manager nor another leader had proactively discussed their “job satisfaction, performance, or future with the organization during the three months before leaving,” and, for those who did have a conversation with their managers, “just 29% said they discussed their future career with the organization.”
Other managers may also make the mistake of guessing what an employee wants. Career development must be an ongoing, transparent conversation between managers and employees.
The business case for career development: numbers you can take to leadership
As employees grow their role-specific skills, they become more engaged and productive, producing higher-quality work. While learning programs can be expensive, turnover may be even more so, costing up to 2x an employee’s salary or more to replace them.
If you need to make a business case for career development, here are several numbers worth bringing up to leadership:
The stat
What it means for your organization
Source
Nearly half of all executives are concerned employees don’t have the right skills to execute their business strategy.
Career development is a great way to future-proof your workforce.
45% of employees who quit voluntarily had no proactive conversations about their satisfaction, performance, or future in the three months before leaving.
Even after offering learning resources, many organizations aren’t communicating with employees about career development, leading to turnover in nearly half of all departures.
What HR can do to connect learning to growth: how to support employee career development
Here’s what you can do to start making development more personal:
Start with the person. Ask what kind of work, responsibilities, and progress an employee wants before recommending specific development actions.
Make internal opportunities accessible. Employees shouldn’t have to look outside your company for new roles. Make them easily visible inside your organization.
Give managers better information. A manager who doesn’t understand an employee’s strengths, learning styles, motivators, or preferences is left to guess about the right path for them.
Instead of course completion or attendance, measure internal mobility and transparency. Ask employees whether they can describe a realistic next step inside the company, and track internal mobility to gauge how well your career development program is working.
Hold regular career conversations. Make regular discussions about development and future roles with employees a core part of managers’ responsibilities.
For more specifics on how to build a high-performing career development program, read: “Career Development Plans for Employees: How to Build One That Works.”
How Wonderlic helps you turn development into retention
Your best people stay when they can see what’s next for them. Wonderlic Develop gives employees and managers job-specific insights into strengths, motivators, and development opportunities. Managers can use those insights alongside Wonderlic’s employee growth plans and Action Planner to have more meaningful development conversations and plan concrete next steps, while employees can take ownership of their development, relieving the burden on managers.
If your organization is still losing employees because of a lack of career growth, your HR team may be offering great learning resources but not connecting them to employees’ individual goals.
Helping employees see internal opportunities and having regular career conversations about where they stand and what they need to do to reach the next step makes staying second nature.
Looking for more employee career development ideas and strategies? Learn how to build a high-performing career development program.
FAQ
How does career development affect retention?
Employees are more likely to stay when they can see a real future inside your organization. For that to happen, employees need to understand what opportunities exist and what they need to develop.
Why is career development important?
It addresses one of the few reasons people leave that an employer can fully control. Compensation is limited by budget and market, and personal circumstances are outside your influence, but whether an employee can see a credible next step inside your organization is almost entirely up to you. Employees who cannot see that step tend to look for it somewhere else, usually before they mention it to anyone.
What are the benefits of career development for employers?
Lower voluntary turnover among top performers, a stronger internal pipeline so more roles can be filled without going to market, and better retention of institutional knowledge. Also, employees who are growing in their careers tend to be more engaged in the work itself, which boosts productivity and performance.
How can HR support employee career development?
Start by finding out what motivates each employee. Make roles visible internally before recruiters start hiring externally. Also, give managers the tools and structure to hold regular growth conversations, and hold them accountable for having those conversations.
How do you improve career development in an organization?
Start by shifting the focus from providing more learning resources to creating clearer career paths. Employees should be able to describe what a realistic next step looks like for them, what they need to develop to reach it, and what support is available. If employees can’t answer those questions, more training content is unlikely to solve the problem.
What is the difference between career development and employee development?
Employee development is the broader practice of improving employees’ skills and capabilities through training, coaching, and other resources. Career development focuses specifically on an individual employee’s trajectory and uses employee development strategies and resources to help employees move toward future roles and take on new responsibilities.
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