Why Skills Development Is Important

Employee development is a strategic and vital tool for an organization’s growth, productivity, and retention. If neglected, attempts at engagement and development will be difficult, and employees will feel frustrated and undervalued – and in turn look for new job opportunities. A study by Bartech Staffing reports that 57% of survey respondents are looking for a new job.

As technology rapidly advances, employees need to be skilled enough to adapt to those changes. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report notes that employers expect 39% of key skills required in the job market to change by 2030. LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer has an even stronger prediction – that 70% of skills required for the average job will be disrupted by 2030. This skills evolution may impact the working world forever, so it’s important to hire the right candidates while also training and developing your existing employees. This dual focus supports talent acquisition and retention efforts across all levels of your organization.

Here are some added benefits to developing employees:

Employees can see their career growth. Dead-end jobs and feeling undervalued are two reasons employees are sure to leave. When the organization doesn’t believe in the worker, why should the worker believe in the organization? When employees feel valued and can see their future growing with the company, they’re more likely to have improved performance, a better attitude, higher engagement, but most importantly, they’re more willing to stay. That’s what talent attraction and retention is all about—investing in people so they invest in you.

You can close skill gaps. The rapid changes happening across industries mean constantly adapting to change. Training your employees will help everyone overcome skill gaps while seeing better results from existing employees. Sharing relevant skill development examples in training can also help clarify what success looks like in each role.

Your organization saves money and resources. The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. That cost keeps going up the higher the employee is in the organizational hierarchy. By using skills development to retain employees, there’s less turnover, and less money spent on recruiting and filling jobs. And that’s why employee skill development is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a cost-saving, business-critical strategy.

On top of that, when employees feel valued, their effort increases, and that can positively affect an organization’s profitability!

Succession planning is stronger. It’s inevitable that people will leave an organization, so you need to be prepared by implementing a succession plan. Succession planning identifies long-term needs and lays out a plan for internal talent to meet those needs. By preparing employees for new roles, they will feel encouraged to remain and grow with the company.

There’s an edge over the competition. Having an effective training and development program empowers your existing workforce and builds a culture of learning. ADP found that workers who feel strongly that their employer is providing the training they need are nearly 6 times more likely to recommend their company as a great place to work. They’re also 3.3 times more likely to describe themselves as highly productive. Upskilling is one powerful secret on how to attract and retain top talent—offer learning opportunities that genuinely support career growth.

Why Employee Retention Matters

Let’s pause and answer a key question: What is talent retention, and why does it matter?

Talent retention refers to an organization’s ability to keep its top employees engaged, satisfied, and committed for the long haul. High turnover leads to lost workplace knowledge, expensive recruiting cycles, and dips in productivity. On the other hand, investing in training and growth directly improves morale and increases retention. One study found that employee retention was a primary expected outcome of training in the automotive, aerospace, electronic, and manufacturing industry specifically.

Retention is also deeply connected to how organizations manage talent acquisition and retention holistically. It’s not just about hiring great people—it’s about keeping them, too.

And when it comes to how to attract diverse talent, companies that demonstrate a clear commitment to equity in skill-building are more likely to stand out. Personalized development opportunities help every employee see a future with your organization—no matter their background.

Creating an Effective, Role-Specific Skills Development Program

As L&D professionals, having a skills-based training program is ideal, but you may think you don’t have the time to devote to it or perhaps you don’t know where to start. Starting from scratch would be a lot of manual work to create a personalized, role-specific training curriculum for each individual employee. Mapping the skills needed for specific job roles, mapping those skills to training content, and then determining your current workforce’s skill gaps would be a massive undertaking. Luckily – BizLibrary is here to support you and walk you through this!

You’ll want to focus on personalized training. Through personalized training, employees can learn the skills and knowledge they need for their journey according to their personal career paths. Instead of implementing a run-of-the-mill, one-size-fits-most training plan, personalizing training provides employees with the learning they need, when and how they need it. This helps boost productivity and retention and can make your organization gain competitive edge.

(Psst…. looking for personalized training for new managers, specifically? Check out our step-by-step guide to creating personalized development plans for new managers now!)

We’ve identified steps to get your organization started on its way to building out personalized skills development to drive individual growth and company-wide success.

What Is a Personalized Upskilling Strategy?

A personalized upskilling strategy is about designing learning pathways based on each employee’s current role, future aspirations, and existing skill level. It’s a critical piece of what is skill development in today’s workforce—it goes beyond general training and instead hones in on what each person needs to grow.

By aligning individual learning goals with business objectives, you strengthen talent attraction and retention. Employees don’t just feel trained—they feel invested in.

When implemented correctly, this approach supports inclusion, enabling you to attract diverse talent by offering equitable learning opportunities tailored to each employee’s starting point.

Determining Skills

Each job role has skills that are essential for success in the role. It’s important to determine these skills to help with career pathing, employee development, and more. Without determining the skills needed for each job role, it will be impossible to help employees learn the skills needed to grow into new roles.

For example, all retail workers need to have excellent customer service skills, while managers and store leaders would need to have business acumen and analytical thinking skills to make sure teams are performing well, staffed appropriately, and staying on budget.

Selecting which content is going to help employees learn the skills they need to succeed is the next step. After defining the skills needed, content that best meets those skills can be selected. This can help with building career paths and learning initiatives.

Choosing the Right Content

Choosing the right content for your organization’s skill development plan can be a stressful process because there are many ways to train and develop employees:

• Microlearning
• Coaching
• Mentorships
• Cross-training
• Job shadowing
• On-the-job training
• Augmented reality
• Classroom training
• Simulated learning
• Roleplaying
• Case studies
• Podcasts
• Videos

With so many choices, it can be a difficult and time-consuming process to find what works for your organization. While we’ve talked about blended learning and its viability, we’re going to focus on delivering training online.

When focusing on online training, there are two options. You can either use an off-the-shelf training content provider, such as BizLibrary, or create custom content needed in house.

The biggest advantage of custom content is that you get exactly what you want because you’ve made it from beginning to end.  It fits your needs perfectly! However, the reality is there’s never enough time or resources available to build out all the content you will need for your program.  

Off-the-shelf content is often far less expensive when you add up all the costs associated with building your own. It’s ready to use upon licensing for a simple transition into training, and it requires much less from internal teams to bring to fruition. For many providers, it’s not customizable, but with BizLibrary, you have several options for customizing the content to fit your branding and preferences.  

How Our Solution Can Help

We have weaved employee skills-development features into our platform that make the process of building employees’ job-specific skills more streamlined, by using job roles pre-mapped to skills and skills pre-mapped to content this helps to cut out the need for long hours of curriculum building.

With this, L&D teams will be able to quickly scale personalized employee skills training by associating learners with standardized job roles and the content that aligns to the skills needed to perform their specific job role (with the ability to customize anything that doesn’t quite fit). Organizations wishing to deliver more personalized, upskilling content will be able to set up a career path for employees, so they learn the skills they need to complete the jobs they’re doing currently or prepare for the jobs they want to do.

Curious to learn more? reach out to us  and learn how our online employee training solutions can meet your organization’s L&D needs!