Employee learning and development: Tips from leading organizations

Even with the right employee engagement strategies, organizations consistently struggle to get learning and development off the ground.

In this article, we share real-world initiatives leading organizations use to overcome this challenge, engage their learners, and deliver tech outcomes.

Lack of time is the biggest upskilling barrier for employees. When organizations provide dedicated learning time and adjust workloads accordingly, they remove this blocker and have a better chance of engaging employees.

Global financial technology leader Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) understands this. To support their enterprise-wide transformation and achieve reductions in cash spend, FIS CM deployed a robust learning strategy strongly supported by executive leadership.

Part of that strategy included two hours per week for employees to focus on learning. This embedded skill development into daily routines and created a culture of learning that permeated every level of the organization.

Thanks to their efforts, they reduced the percentage of novice-level employees from 47% to 13%.

Learn how FIS empowered a future-ready workforce.

When you have a global workforce spread across countries, continents, and timezones, a sprawling tech stack, and ever-evolving customer needs, creating a unified learning experience for your people is no small feat. 

Equans offers global multitechnical services across the energy, infrastructure, and industrial sectors. Their IT community—known as OneITeam—supports nearly 90,000 employees across 20 countries alone.

Equans knew they needed a way to bring everything together if they wanted to engage employees and provide equal opportunity for every IT professional to learn and grow.

They implemented employee learning and development that featured:

• Localized learning. HR and CIOs in each country tailor personalized learning pathways to local team needs while remaining aligned with global strategy.

• Gamification and challenges. Friendly competitions drive engagement and reinforce a shared culture of upskilling.

• Flexible, mobile-first learning. Employees use the Pluralsight mobile app to maximizing learning efficiency—even during their commutes.

“With Pluralsight, we’ve created one tool, one community, and one mindset. Every IT employee, regardless of geography, has the same chance to learn and grow,” says Annabelle Eggerling, IT Line HR Manager at Equans.

See how Equans created a united IT community.

While leadership buy-in is crucial to getting employees on board with upskilling, peer influence can really make things stick. When employees see their teammates learning, upskilling starts to feel less like a mandate and more like a shared community activity.

Internal champions are critical to building this community at scale, and Sage is just one example of how champions can inspire their teammates.

Sage provides finance, HR, and payroll software their customers trust to make work and money flow. To deliver on this promise, they needed to to build a culture of trust where everyone, especially those in engineering teams, feels empowered and confident when it comes to cybersecurity.

Their solution was forming the Security Champion Network. This group of 180 engineering employees—including developers, testers, architects, and more—drives transparency and consistent communication between security and product. 

What’s more, these engineers dedicate 3.5 hours a week to helping the security team implement new tooling, raising security issues, and serving as a general point of contact for the organization.

Thanks to these internal champions and the security culture they built, more than 1,300 Sage engineering employees learn new skills weekly, with 60% of team members doing more than the recommended courses. All the learning has paid off: Sage has seen a staggering 82% reduction in time to address security vulnerabilities.

Read more about Sage’s quest to deliver customer-centric security.

It’s one thing to train a single team. It’s another to train an entire organization and build relevant upskilling initiatives for different roles.

But it is possible, and Coppel, the leading Mexican retail and financial services company, is living proof. To meet evolving needs and personalize IT skill development at scale, they established the Tech Academy.

As part of this effort, Coppel leveraged Skill IQ assessments to create personalized learning pathways for over 3,500 technologists, aligning training to 175 distinct IT roles across 22 key priorities. The Tech Academy enabled Coppel to efficiently map out the skills needed across its IT organization, including key technologies such as Java and Google Cloud.

Through these structured communities and internal gamification, Coppel saw a 70% reduction in time required to upskill employees. 

Learn more about how Coppel accelerated digital transformation with targeted employee upskilling.

For many organizations, upskilling is how they keep pace with the latest trends and develop a future-ready workforce. To do that, they need to build continuous learning into the flow of everyday work.

Saab AB, a global defense and security technology company operating across air, land, sea, space, and cyber, set out to do just that. 

They started by making learning more accessible. By integrating their learning solution of choice, Pluralsight, into their existing learning management system, they created a seamless experience within the broader employee workflow.

From there, they provided hands-on experiences and learning paths. They further accelerated team member adoption with subject matter expert (SME) champions, engaged leaders, and cluster leaders who provided targeted communication and ensured local relevance across teams.

“Engagement starts with relevance,” said Navid Azadi, L&D Specialist at Saab. “Our people get not just courses but labs, assessments, and hands-on paths.”

Their efforts paid off: They produced 800+ cloud-trained employees, and 76% of Saab employees reported higher work quality after upskilling.

Uncover the full story behind Saab’s tech upskilling transformation.

Generating enthusiasm for employee learning and development isn’t always easy. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take inspiration from success stories, find what works for your organization, and make adjustments as you go. 

Learn how to implement these tech skill development strategies and deliver measurable results—get the Tech Upskilling Playbook.

Pluralsight helps teams build the tech skills they need to close gaps and accelerate business outcomes. Learn more about our hands-on skill development solutions.