The answer to the skills crisis hides in plain sight.
In a world of constant flux, organizations are only as adaptable as their people and their skills. Today nearly half of learning and talent development professionals see a skills crisis, with 49% agreeing, “My executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy.”
To address this gap, learning is critical. But new LinkedIn data says there’s also more to it. Learning combined with career development — leadership training, coaching, internal mobility, and more — accelerates the flow of critical skills to keep pace with business needs.
Why is career development — a classic idea with new relevance — so powerful for adaptability and growth? Consider that career progress is people’s No. 1 motivation to learn. When employees don’t move ahead, they leave and take their skills elsewhere. By investing in career development, employers counteract the anxiety that comes with rapid change by building loyalty, energy, and innovation for the next era of work. In short, great companies are built on great careers.
Read on for data and advice to put career-driven learning into action.
What are organizations that embrace career development gaining over those that do not? To help answer this question, LinkedIn used survey responses to identify where organizations rank on a career development maturity curve, with the most mature qualifying as “career development champions.”
The upshot: Only 36% of organizations fall into the career development champions category with robust programs that yield business results. Another 31% have career development programs with limited adoption, and 33% have no initiatives or are just getting started.
What sets career development champions apart?
How do career development champions outpace others in indicators of business success?
Career development champions outperform non-champions on a range of positive indicators. They’re more confident in their ability to be profitable and to attract and retain talent. Significantly, career development champions are better positioned to reap the benefits of generative AI (GAI) transformation; 51% describe their organization as a frontrunner in GAI adoption (at the “leading” or “accelerating” stage), compared to 36% of those with weaker career development programs. Stated another way, career development champions are 42% more likely to be frontrunners in GAI adoption compared to all others.
Mature career development initiatives correlate with positive outlook for profitability, confidence to attract and retain talent, and GAI adoption.
Leading perspectives
Data gathered from the LinkedIn platform also shows positive outcomes for organizations that prioritize career development. For this analysis, LinkedIn created a Career Development Index that scored organizations on four indicators of career support: commitments on the organization’s company page; keywords in job postings; prevalence of leadership development skills within the employee base; and high levels of internal mobility.
Based on their scores, companies were split into five groups of equal size, called quintiles. The group with the highest scores was compared to the bottom group to see how their results differed. Compared with low-scoring organizations, those with strong index scores are more likely to see three positive outcomes:
- More employees who engage with learning — crucial for maintaining a flow of business-relevant skills.
- Higher rate of promotions — an indicator that more employees are achieving impactful job performance.
- Higher rate of promotions into positions of management and leadership — signifying a healthy pipeline of people who have institutional knowledge and strategic acumen.
Organizations scoring high on the Career Development Index have higher rates of engaged learners and job promotions.
Of course, promotions are not the only way to help employees feel a sense of career progress. Upskilling, coaching, and internal role changes help people feel valued, engaged, and more likely to stay with their organization. “Employees are saying, ‘I expect you as an employer to help me keep up, and if not, I’m going to go somewhere else,’ ” says Josh Bersin, global HR industry analyst.
To better understand how employee turnover drains key skills from an organization, an additional analysis of LinkedIn platform data identified the skills most likely to show a net depletion at companies with more than 50 hires and 50 departures. The most at-risk skill? Business strategy — the ability to set goals and adjust to changing market forces.
Other at-risk skills include strategic planning, sales management, and project planning. All are hard-to-replace skills that require critical thinking, working with uncertainty, and institutional knowledge.
The top 10 skills lost to attrition are the most valuable to the company and the hardest to replace.
Modern organizations must be “tenacious about embracing agility,” says Naphtali Bryant, executive coach and leadership development consultant at RAC Leadership. Together, GAI adoption and career development can be twin engines for future success, each powering the other to unleash productivity, innovation, and adaptability. “Think of it as a unified strategy for agility,” Naphtali says.
Taking a more detailed look at the survey data, the research focuses on four stages of GAI upskilling: not yet started, emerging, accelerating, and leading. Career development champions outpace non-champions at both the accelerating and leading levels of GAI adoption — indicating the strong relationship between career support and future-facing upskilling.
The state of GAI adoption: Career development champions show significant adoption compared to others.
Many career development champions view AI as a competitive advantage that they can scale across their organizations — upskilling employees on a wide range of roles and levels of proficiency. For example, administrative assistants benefit from introductory GAI fluency while engineers require highly technical skills to build and deploy AI-based systems.
And many are acting in line with Naphtali’s advice — pursuing AI upskilling and career development in equal measure. Compared to non-champions, career development champions are 32% more likely to be deploying AI training programs this year and 88% more likely to offer career-enhancing gig opportunities or project-based learning. Even though champions already offer tangible career support for employees, they are 33% more likely to agree that career development is more of a priority this year.
So what are the most common best practices for career-building initiatives? Leadership training comes out on top — 71% of organizations offer leadership training.
The most common career development practices are leadership training and sharing internal job postings.
Percentage of career development champions who employ each practice. Respondents selected all that apply.
Career development stories
What’s standing in the way of bigger leaps forward on career development? A picture emerges: Managers, employees, and talent teams are all stretched too thin to go beyond daily work and make progress for their teams, themselves, and their organizations.
Asked to choose the top three barriers standing in the way of career development, respondents say a lack of time and resources is a glaring pain point: 50% say managers lack proper support, 45% say employees lack support, and 33% say talent teams themselves lack support.
But only 11% of survey respondents cite “leadership doesn’t value career development” as one of their top three barriers. Clearly, most leadership teams are not standing in the way of career development, but they are also not addressing the systemic challenges to allow managers, employees, and talent teams to properly prioritize it.
Talent leaders must bring this story to life for the C-suite and articulate what’s needed to drive bottom-line results. To help this conversation, here are five talent strategy foundations that organizations can adopt to create business value with career development and continuous learning.
It’s a simple idea — put the right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs, at the right time. But most talent leaders know that building an agile skills ecosystem is easier said than done.
Artificial intelligence is here to help. While AI is revolutionizing in-demand skills, it’s also delivering the dynamic, on-demand, and personalized learning technology to help organizations keep up. Organizations no longer need to choose between personalization and scale. And L&D pros are leaning in to use AI for their own routines — 71% are exploring, experimenting, or integrating AI into their work.
Other talent development practices that promote speed and agility include tracking skills gap data, creating skills-based career paths, collaborating with executives and talent colleagues, and using skills assessments. Less common across the board: large-scale upskilling initiatives that can be slow-moving and laborious. Not surprisingly, agile practices are more common for career development champions. Check out the Playbook on Agile Approaches to Upskilling for more tips and strategies.
Skills-based talent strategies are more prevalent for career development champions and include greater collaboration with executives and cross-functional HR teams.
Accelerating skill building through closer collaboration
AI is reshaping skills at lightning speed. To meet the moment, we compressed a 12-month plan to redesign Teradyne’s core curriculum into 45 days. Our mission went beyond rapid upskilling — we aimed to foster a culture of continuous learning, strengthen career paths, and boost learner engagement. We embraced an iterative approach with our strategy — gathering weekly feedback from functional leaders and tracking real-time data on learners’ interests and skills. By bringing stakeholders in at every step and embracing progress over perfection, we’ve helped Teradyne become more adaptive and agile.
Kelly Salek
Director of Talent Development at Teradyne
Focusing on internal mobility helps build an agile workforce that can apply transferable skills and cross-functional knowledge across the organization. It’s not surprising, then, that about half of both career development champions (55%) and all other survey respondents (48%) see internal mobility as a higher priority in the year ahead.
More than half of career development champions see internal mobility as a rising priority.