Best Practices for Employee Training and Development

Key takeaways

• Employee training and development builds the skills employees need today (training) and the capabilities they will need next (development).
• Training is usually employer-led and tied to the current role; development is often employee-initiated and aimed at future roles.
• The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 expects 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030.
• LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found 88% of organizations are concerned about retaining employees, and that providing learning opportunities was the top retention strategy
• The five common types are technical training, soft skills training, leadership development, professional development, and personal development.

Training and development earns its budget when it is tied to a result the business already measures. This guide covers what employee training and development is, how training differs from development, the benefits, five common types, and a real example.

What Is Employee Training and Development?

Employee training and development is the structured work of building the skills employees need today and the capabilities they will need next. Training closes gaps in a current role, such as a new system or a compliance rule. Development prepares people for future roles and growth. Effective programs tie both to a business result the organization already measures.

A program has many moving parts, from facilitators to course curriculums to eLearning. The program-level work of tying all of it to a business goal is what Intellum calls employee education.

The Difference Between Training and Development

Employee training equips your people with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their immediate roles. Training can be proactive (e.g., a customer service training when onboarding a new hire) as well as reactive (e.g., a cybersecurity training following a data breach). In either case, employee training tends to focus on short-term learnings.

Employee development, by contrast, is the long-term acquisition of skills and knowledge in pursuit of future roles. Whereas training tends to be employer-led, development is often initiated by the employee; it’s also almost exclusively proactive. 

Although both training and development serve to enable employees and improve performance, they’re best thought of as complementary pieces of the same puzzle. To engage and retain great talent, it’s crucial to balance immediate training needs with long-term development goals.

Our guide to why employee development matters covers the benefits for employees and the business.

Benefits of Employee Training and Development

There are several benefits to employee training and development, including fewer skill gaps, higher performance, better retention, lower support costs, and more revenue.

Fewer skill gaps

In any free market, there’s bound to be friction as workers leave old jobs in pursuit of new opportunities. For too long, however, the business world has suffered from a sizable skills gap—and the chasm is only widening. The World Economic Forum projects that 39% of employees’ core skills (e.g., reading, writing, programming) will change by 2030.

Employees and employers alike must adapt to the changes—or risk being swept up by them. Thankfully, employee learning is an effective means of narrowing the skills gap. By taking the time to upskill your workforce, you ensure your people have transferable skills they can apply within their roles, no matter what the future brings. A skills gap analysis shows where to start.

Higher performance

Learning and development isn’t just a means of staving off disruption. With proper planning, your employee training and development program can make for a critical competitive advantage.

When you empower people to grow in their roles, those employees eventually become candidates for expanded responsibilities within your organization. Soon, the entry-level BDR you hired gains enough on-the-job sales experience to qualify for an Account Executive role. With the right development conversations, they could eventually move into a Sales Manager role—and begin training an entirely new cohort of high-potential sales reps.

Now apply that effective employee training regimen across your entire organization. When every employee is growing toward that next personal milestone, it means your company is constantly growing too. And that’ll pay dividends in discretionary effort and performance metrics.

Improve employee retention and engagement

Training and development increases employee engagement and retention, because people stay where they can see a way to grow.

When employees feel the company is investing in their next role, they have less reason to look for it elsewhere. By offering incentives such as education stipends and mentorship programs, you stand to gain not just happier, more engaged employees, but higher retention rates too.

Business results

Training and development shows up in the business in two places: lower costs and higher revenue. On the cost side, employees trained for their role need less help, and in customer-facing jobs that means shorter queues and better-informed reps. On the revenue side, the benefits above add up to a more skilled, engaged workforce that stays longer. Education teams now plan for both. In Intellum’s 2026 Education-Led Growth Report, 81.6% of programs cited revenue growth as a primary objective and 60% cited cost reduction. For the price of doing nothing, see the costs of neglecting employee training; for more figures, see these employee training statistics.

The takeaway: If your leadership team isn’t prioritizing employee training and development, they’re leaving money on the table. Thankfully, there are scalable education platforms—like Intellum’s employee training software—that are easy to deploy and get value from quickly.

Types of Employee Training and Development

As you consider starting or expanding your training and development efforts, you might wonder if there’s a “right” place to start. There’s a wide array of training and development programs to pursue, and it’s crucial to know how each can benefit your business.

Here are five distinct areas of employee training and development that can serve as a starting point:

Technical training: This training focuses on helping employees excel in their tactical, day-to-day roles. Technical training can cover the responsibilities of a role (e.g., a sales rep perfecting talk tracks or cold email outreach). Or, it can cover a specific resource or tool (e.g., a data analyst learning Tableau).

Soft skills training: Whereas technical training aims to help employees complete specific tasks, soft skills training focuses on broader, widely applicable practices. An easy example is a communications training designed to help teammates work together more effectively. Emotional intelligence, time management, and critical thinking all fall under the “soft skills” category.

Leadership development: True to its name, leadership development focuses on helping employees navigate the organization with greater confidence and conviction. Often facilitated via mentorship or coaching, leadership development enables people to broaden their influence, build stronger relationships, and become effective people, project, or function managers.

Professional development: Whereas leadership development pertains to the needs of the business, professional development is geared more toward the employee and their career aspirations. A professional development conversation might task the employee with identifying career goals, then designing a five- or 10-year plan to help achieve those goals.

Personal development: If professional development helps the individual work toward career goals, personal development helps them work toward more emotional or social goals. An employee might use a personal development check-in to develop greater self-awareness or EQ, so they can better collaborate with their team members, manager, or direct reports.

Example: How Allied Universal Measures Training and Development

Employee training and development programs look different from company to company. Even if you’re clear on the types of training and development to pursue, it helps to know what’s worked elsewhere, so you can replicate successes and learn from failures. For more examples, see our guide to employee training programs.

Here’s an example from a global security company:

Allied Universal shows what measuring training against business results looks like. Its security professionals work around the clock under local, state, and federal rules, so its program, The EDGE, blends virtual modules, classroom sessions, on-the-job training, and podcasts. 

Allied has run The EDGE on Intellum since 2009 and now trains more than 300,000 employees with one LMS administrator, at nearly 585,000 course completions a month. The L&D team tracks completions by branch in Domo and compares them with safety incidents and client retention for the same branches. Read the Allied Universal case study to learn more.

Build a Culture of Continual Learning With Intellum

Training and development is everyone’s responsibility—not just HR’s or L&D’s. To make learning part of your company culture, the whole organization has to buy in.

Intellum can help make your culture of continual learning possible. Use our platform to design courses, deliver webinars, engage employees with social and gamified learning, and more. Our authoring tools are powerful and easy to use, allowing you to focus less on building and more on teaching. Track results with our data dashboard, and demonstrate ROI with confidence.

Schedule a demo, and see Intellum in action for yourself.