7 employee engagement strategies to improve L&D

Even if employees are excited to learn, getting them to engage with your upskilling program can be a challenge when they have competing priorities. Employee engagement strategies can help you motivate learners and close critical skills gaps in the process.

Employee engagement refers to how connected employees feel to their organization. Employee satisfaction is part of it, but it’s also how emotionally committed employees are to their work. 

In the context of upskilling, it means employees are fully engaged with learning. They’re enthusiastic and genuinely interested in developing new skills to grow their careers and contribute to organizational goals.

If you implement best practices for employee engagement, you’ll reap some major benefits. Thanks to training and development programs, 87% of learners acquire skills they can immediately apply to their jobs. What’s more, organizations are 7% more productive and 21% more profitable when they offer training to engaged employees.

But the flip side is also true: When employees aren’t engaged with learning, skills gaps widen, productivity plummets, and projects stall out before they even begin. In fact, 47% of organizations have already abandoned projects due to IT skills gaps.

And if employees lack development opportunities, they may leave your organization, leading to turnover, vacant roles, and hiring expenses (on top of the cost of underused learning resources.)

95% of executives say building a culture of learning is a priority at their organization, but 95% of IT and business professionals say they need more support to learn tech skills.

If you can bridge this disconnect with best practices for employee engagement, you’ll help learners upskill and build the skills your organization needs most.

Here’s how to boost employee engagement for L&D initiatives.

The first step to improving learner engagement? Get the word out. Build excitement for upskilling and make sure employees are aware of the learning and development opportunities available.

• Collaborate with the marketing team. Marketers can help you change employees’ perceptions of learning and development, turning it from a dreaded task to an exciting opportunity. If you aren’t sure how to promote learning and development initiatives, ask your marketing team for advice. They may help you roll out communications to employees, convey the benefits of upskilling, and generate buzz.
• Share widely. Get your training programs in front of as many people as possible. Post it in organization-wide channels like Slack, internal newsletters, and your company intranet. 
• Join team meetings. Hold a meeting to introduce your upskilling program to employees. You can also ask to join team or department meetings to share more information, clear up any misconceptions, and answer employee questions.

With limited time, many employees struggle to begin learning. They need an external motivator to kick start their journey, and team or organizational goals aren’t enough. They need to see how upskilling will benefit them personally.

Keep this in mind when you roll out your plans to employees. Upskilling can help them:

• Stay competitive in a changing industry. Upskilling helps employees build future-ready skills and more resilient careers. Think about generative AI: It was largely unheard of a few years ago, but now AI literacy is a basic job requirement. 
• Unlock career advancement opportunities. Learning new tech or soft skills can give employees the experience they need to grow their careers. (In fact, IT professionals say certifications are the top way they’ve gotten promotions or raises.)
• Build confidence. Between imposter syndrome, new technologies, and changing business priorities, employees may feel like they’re constantly a step behind. Upskilling can help them build confidence, improve communication, and boost job satisfaction.
• Achieve personal development or growth goals. Employees may have passion projects outside their daily work. Learning new skills can get them one step closer to achieving their personal goals.

Have you ever spent half an hour scrolling through Netflix, looking for something to watch before giving up and doing something else? The same thing can happen with learning platforms. 

Online course platforms have thousands of options to choose from. Without clear direction, employees can quickly become overwhelmed and decide that learning is too hard. They need a single source of truth with clear guidance so they can jump right into learning without sifting through thousands of resources to find what’s relevant.

Thankfully, you don’t need to start from scratch. You can tweak existing resources to create these hubs for your teams.

• Use your company intranet. Create a dedicated page on your intranet for learning and development. Include links to learning content, manager enablement resources, learner shoutouts, training sessions, and anything else people need to know. 
• Leverage your learning management system (LMS) or online learning platform. Use your learning platform to organize resources, create role-based learning paths, and surface the most relevant content for each team.

According to one survey, 83% of employees who receive gamified training feel motivated, while 61% of employees who receive non-gamified training feel bored and unproductive. 

Gamification creates a positive feedback loop that encourages employees to learn, awarding points, badges, and other prizes for upskilling. To get started, determine which upskilling activities to gamify, how you’ll measure progress, and what type of rewards you’ll provide.

From there, you might:

• Create a leaderboard and recognize the top three learners each month

• Provide exclusive badges or prizes to employees who upskill

• Kick off a skills or certification challenge that uses gamification elements 

Learn how to gamify tech skill development—download the Tech Upskilling Playbook.

In one study, STEM students who received a relevant assignment (using climate data to analyze global warming) were more motivated and engaged than those who received an irrelevant assignment (analyzing simulated dart scores).

Corporate training works the same way. When learning is relevant, people are more likely to engage with it. That’s what makes personalized learning experiences so valuable. In many cases, you don’t even need to change the content you provide—just reframe it.  

• Create role- and skill-based learning paths. Learning paths personalized to someone’s role, skill set, or experience level ensure they learn only the skills they need. They aren't wasting their time on basic or irrelevant information.

• Use AI assistants to personalize at scale. AI assistants can help you personalize learning without greatly increasing your workload. Learners can also use assistants to develop their own learning journeys based on unique goals.

• Lean on your learning platform. Look for online learning platforms that provide personalized learning recommendations and allow you to create custom learning experiences for different teams.

• Provide real-world upskilling examples. If employees are skeptical about learning, show them how learning new skills or tools will make their lives easier. Tailor these examples to their role and responsibilities. 

Learn how to create personalized learning paths for tech skills.

Providing any sort of incentive for learning can improve engagement. But you’ll earn bonus points if your incentives match employee motivations for learning.

According to the Pluralsight 2025 Tech Skills Report, employees’ top motivations for learning new skills include higher salary (48%), stronger job security (43%), and career advancement opportunities (43%).

Incentives can vary widely—you don’t have to provide the most expensive rewards to recognize employees and make them feel valued. You can:

• Spotlight learners on social media or organization-wide communication channels

• Give top learners unique banners or images they can use on LinkedIn

• Provide gift cards or company swag

• Offer coffee chats with executives 

• Provide extra vacation time 

• Cover costs for workshops, conferences, and external training sessions

Upskilling doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If your wider organizational culture doesn’t support learning and development, employees won’t upskill no matter what engagement strategies you try.

Creating a learning culture takes time, but there are a few things you can do to get one off the ground:

• Give employees time to learn. Lack of time is the biggest barrier to learning. Provide dedicated on-the-job learning time (and adjust delivery dates accordingly) so employees can upskill without worry.
• Enable managers. L&D initiatives can stall out if managers don’t know how to support their teams. Show managers how learning benefits their goals and give them learning paths, meeting templates, and other resources to encourage learning among their people.
• Treat mistakes as learning opportunities. If employees are afraid to fail, they’re afraid to learn. Encourage responsible experimentation by framing mistakes as lessons and setting up environments where employees can practice new skills without unnecessary risk. 
• Create learning cohorts or study clubs. Employees who learn together can motivate each other, ask each other questions, and improve collaboration between teams. Set up learning cohorts where people learning the same skill can discuss what they’ve learned and share information. You can also create study clubs for employees to learn separate skills in a shared environment.

Once you’ve implemented some of these employee engagement strategies, it’s time to see if they’ve made a difference. 

Track engagement metrics like:

• Number of active users

• Course completion rate

• Learner drop-off rate

• Learning hours completed

• Skill assessment scores before and after upskilling

• Time to competence

You can also gather qualitative feedback from employees using surveys to further optimize your upskilling programs.

Uncover more metrics to track L&D ROI.

Employee engagement is important, especially for proving the value of learning and development in your organization. But it’s not the end goal. 

Ultimately, employees need to upskill so they can contribute to organizational goals and grow their careers. That’s where the real value of upskilling lies—engagement is just one step along that journey. 

The right learning partner can help you improve engagement and deliver ROI. Learn more about how to boost employee engagement and build future-ready tech teams with Pluralsight.