Employee development is how you help people build the skills, judgment, and confidence they need to do better work over time. Training teaches someone how to perform a task. Development gives them a path to grow into larger responsibilities, solve harder problems, and stay engaged with the business.
Done well, employee development improves retention, performance, and customer experience. Research from Gallup has linked strategic employee development with stronger profitability and retention, which is why the best programs are treated as operating systems, not one-off courses.
This Process Street post will explain it all, by answering the following questions:
- What is employee development & why do it?
- What’s the difference between employee development & employee training?
- What are the main challenges of employee development & training?
- How do I implement a successful employee development program?
- Why is employee development a long-term investment for success?
Ready to start training and developing your employees?
What is employee development & why do it?
Put simply, employee development is a process that employees can follow to improve their skills and knowledge, with the support of their employer.
Employee development can improve the entire organizational culture by boosting morale, strengthening positive working relationships, and giving people a clearer reason to stay. Gallup’s 2025 research on barriers blocking employee development also points to learning and growth opportunities as a lever for productivity and profitability. If staff members are offered the opportunity to improve and gain additional skills, they’ll feel respected, valued, and happier in their jobs. As a direct result, they‘ll become more motivated, more loyal, and more positive.
This kind of culture will attract new employees, keep existing ones happy, and prevent toxic ones from wreaking havoc.
What’s the difference between employee development & employee training?
Employee training utilizes several programs to enable an employee to develop the necessary skills, practices, and competencies to help them do their job.
Employee development, on the other hand, comprises professional, practical, and personal growth to holistically develop an employee.
But what does this mean?
Well, your staff aren’t machines that you can program to perform certain functions. They are people with emotional, physical, and intellectual needs. So, to bring out the best in your workforce, you need to focus on both training and developing your employees.
What are the main challenges of employee development & training?
As we’ve established, employee training and development is a crucial part of running a successful business. But, it does come with its fair share of challenges.
Remote and hybrid working
Distributed work is now a normal operating model, not just an emergency response. Hybrid and remote teams need development programs that are clear, repeatable, and easy to access across time zones.
Use a documented remote work framework, shared learning paths, and specific milestones so every employee knows what is expected during training and development. The more async the team, the more important it is to define ownership, deadlines, feedback loops, and completion criteria.
Different learning techniques
It doesn’t matter whether you’re training or developing ten employees or 10,000: Everyone is different. People have different ways of learning and different ways of retaining information.
When drafting a training and development program, you must factor in such issues. For instance, one staff member might find it difficult to use technology to learn, while another might be totally tech-savvy and not know of any other way to learn.
So, you should consider different training programs for different groups. Senior staff members might require a different schedule to younger, tech-savvy employees.
Engagement levels
When it comes to hands-on learning and development programs, there are many variables. However, one aspect that remains constant is engagement. You need to make sure that your employees are cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally engaged in the learning and development program.
It’s not uncommon for employees to withdraw themselves when they find the overall course challenging. To avoid such problems, consider using discussion forums to help encourage your workforce to interact, openly discuss problems, and offer support to each other.
Additionally, consider having avenues in which employees can come and openly express their personal or work-related issues to you.
So that’s what employee development is, what the difference between employee development and employee training is, and what the main challenges are.
Now, let’s look at how to implement a successful employee development and training program.
How do I implement a successful employee development program?
Below, are 10 key tips for creating and implementing a successful employee development and training program. Let’s go through each one.
Tip #1: Have a clear goal in mind
The first step to developing a successful employee development and training program is understanding what you want to achieve with it.
To do this, you must start by identifying what your overall business goals are. Once this is sorted, you can then work backward to determine exactly what you need to achieve with your employee development and training program.
Brainstorm with management, leadership teams, and external stakeholders to determine what ‘good’ looks like. Establish what the key performance indicators (KPIs) for successful employee development and training programs should be, and why these performance indicators are key to the success of your employee development and training programs.
Once you’ve worked out what you want your employee development and training to achieve and why, you can then focus on building the development and training program. Talk your employees through your ideas. Ask them for their feedback and analyze what they say. Find out what they think. Establish what works and what doesn’t, and tweak your plan accordingly.
Which leads us nicely onto tip number two!
Tip #2: Keep measuring satisfaction levels
Most employees consider training and development to be a crucial part of their career. New employees would leave an organization if suitable training and development opportunities weren’t available, and more than 2 in 3 workers would leave their current employer if a better development opportunity arose.
It’s therefore hugely important to get your employee development and training program right, from the start.
But how do you get it right?
By conducting career development surveys before you launch a development and training program, during the training and development program, and also as part of your new employee onboarding process.
Development surveys are used to measure employee satisfaction towards a development program. A well-crafted employee development and training survey will help you to:
- Understand how your employees feel about the current development and training opportunities;
- Establish the best course of action to avoid potential dissatisfaction in the future.
The last thing you want to do is invest a lot of money into a training or development course that your employees aren’t interested in. It will likely lead to failure, costly errors, and high staff turnover.
A development and training survey will help you to generate ideas that will enhance your development and training program while keeping the probability of failure low.
Tip #3: Ask employees what they want
To elaborate on tips 1 and 2, before you start an employee development and training program, you should talk to your employees.
Asking for your employees’ opinions on your proposed employee development and training programs will motivate them and give them a sense of belonging. They appreciate being asked for their thoughts via surveys because they can provide their honest thoughts and feelings anonymously, but still feel heard. This ultimately leads to increased loyalty and higher employee retention rates.
Tip #4: Choose the right people
One of the main challenges with employee development and training is finding the right professionals to bring out the best in your employees. TalentLMS research found that limited learning opportunities can make employees more likely to leave, which makes relevant development and training a retention issue, not just an HR initiative.
Poorly implemented training programs are not only bad for overall employee performance, but they are also a waste of time and money.
Don’t hire one training and development organization and leave them to it.
Carefully pick and choose the right people for the right training and development opportunities. Your employees will enjoy developing and training with professionals who understand them far more than a generic team of professionals who churn out standardized training and development plans.
Offload some of this risk by hiring people who can not only run fun and engaging sessions with your staff, but can also help you with setting up and implementing the required infrastructure for employee development and training.
Tip #5: Develop soft skills
Organizations are made up of different people, with different beliefs, from different backgrounds and cultures. For the business to function as a cohesive unit, you need to consider developing and training your employees on their interpersonal skills, or soft skills.
Soft skills refer to the interpersonal attributes that employees need in order to succeed in their line of work.
Listed below are the seven universally accepted soft skills:
- Leadership skills;
- Interpersonal skills;
- Flexibility and adaptability;
- Communication;
- Teamwork;
- Work ethic;
- Problem solving.
Your workforce needs individuals who possess the above skills, so make sure the development of these soft skills forms part of your employee development and training program.
Tip #6: Benchmark skills against the market
Employee development should help your team meet the standard your market now expects. Instead of copying a competitor’s training program, benchmark the roles, skills, certifications, tools, and customer expectations that matter in your industry.
Use sources like industry communities, role scorecards, customer feedback, employee surveys, and current learning reports such as the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report. Then cross-reference that evidence with your own goals so the program closes real skill gaps, not imagined ones.
Tip #7: Use real life experiences
Training and development exercises are often delivered with rigidity. Principles and concepts are usually taken straight out of textbooks and can, as a result, be dull, dry, and difficult for your staff to comprehend.
According to professional life coach and trainer Michael Arnold, true stories and real-life examples can have a positive effect on people’s learning abilities. He suggests that training and development programs should include specific stories on how staff can use the skills and information learned, in their day-to-day tasks. It will not only break the monotony of constant textbook learning but it will also help your employees retain and use the information in their jobs.
Tip #8: Focus on the process
To make sure your employee development and training program is followed without constant oversight, build a repeatable process around it.
That is where workflow automation platforms help. Process Street is a Compliance Operations Platform that brings Docs, Ops, and Cora together so teams can turn development plans into governed, auditable workflows.
You can document expectations in Docs, run the development process in Ops, assign tasks to managers and employees, collect approvals, trigger reminders, and use Cora to help spot gaps or suggest improvements. That keeps development from living in scattered documents, spreadsheets, and inboxes.
You can build your own employee development and training templates from scratch, or you can browse our template library and use as many pre-made templates as you like. Try these out for starters:
Employee Development Plan Template
This Employee Development Plan Template is designed to help you improve employee engagement, encourage retention, and establish a pipeline of promotable talent.
Click here to access the Employee Development Plan Template!
Training Plan Template
This Training Plan Template will help you train your staff in a way that will improve production and generate efficiencies. This in turn will cut costs, reduce mistakes, build confidence, and create a better working environment.
Click here to access the Training Plan Template!
Employee Satisfaction Survey
This Employee Satisfaction Survey will help you to establish what your workforce thinks about the way the company operates, how they feel about their job, and if they understand and agree with the direction of the company.
Click here to access the Employee Satisfaction Survey!
To access these templates, log in and add them to your account, or sign up for a free trial.
Tip #9: Track their progress
When you implement a new employee development and training program, you need to know whether it is changing job satisfaction, skill growth, and performance.
Track progress with live workflow data instead of waiting for a quarterly review. In Process Street, managers can see which development workflows are complete, which tasks are overdue, who owns each step, and where employees are getting stuck.
That makes it easier to adjust the program before it fails. You can also connect employee development workflows to HR systems through native automations, webhooks, API integrations, or Zapier, so progress data moves without manual reporting.
Tip #10: Make it useful and motivating
Employee development and training programs are serious, but they should not feel like a box-checking exercise. People stay engaged when the work feels relevant to their goals, their role, and the problems they are trying to solve.
Use real scenarios, manager coaching, recognition, peer discussion, and practical milestones. Incentives can help, but the strongest motivator is usually progress employees can see: new skills, clearer career paths, and work they are trusted to own.
Why is employee development a long-term investment for success?
Employee development and training programs are beneficial to both business owners and their workforce.
On one hand, you build a more capable workforce that can serve customers, improve operations, and adapt as the business changes. On the other hand, employees get a clearer path to growth, stronger skills, and more reasons to stay.
One thing is for sure: if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your business.
If you can create an effective learning and development program and weave it into your company culture, you give the business a durable advantage. The goal is not just to run a course. The goal is to build a development process people can follow, improve, and prove over time.
Hopefully, with these 10 tips, you’ll be able to develop an effective, cost-efficient training and development program for your workforce.
The post 10 Ways to Instantly Improve Employee Development first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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