Recruiting is just the beginning.

Once the right people are in the door, the real work begins. If you’ve read my first two posts on Talent Strategy and Talent Acquisition Strategy, you know this isn’t about one-and-done hiring. It’s about building a system that helps people thrive once they join. That’s where talent development strategy comes in which is the second pillar in a complete talent game plan.

At its core, talent development is how you turn potential into performance. It’s how you make sure your people are not just filling seats but growing, producing, and ready for more. In a job market that moves fast, you can’t afford to leave development to chance.

Why Development Matters More Than Ever

Let’s be clear: companies that don’t invest in development lose people, lose momentum, and eventually lose market share. Here’s why it matters now:

• According to the World Economic Forum almost 44% of fundamental job skills will change by 2028. This is because of the rise in AI, automation, and technology. Helping your internal talent evolve will in turn evolve your business.
• Employees expect growth (even demand it). Learning and development opportunities are now the main driver of workplace culture, studies suggest that employee are even wanting it above compensation and flexibility (LinkedIn, 2023).
• Internal growth is faster and cheaper. Research by SHRM shows the average cost-per-hire is approximately $4,700. When you promote from within, however, you get people who already know the business and perform faster, and your business has a lower turnover rate.

If you’re investing in talent acquisition strategy, but not talent development strategy, you’re pouring water into bucket with a hole in it.

What Is Talent Development Strategy?

A Talent Development Strategy is a plan to grow the people you hire. It is how you build capability from inside of your organization and is one of the best ways to retain talent and prepare your business for the future.

Hosting a random workshop or training once a month or quarter is not a development strategy. An organization must design a system that helps people build the right skills to take on new roles and responsibility, keep up with technology and market trends and ultimately step into leadership if and when that time comes.

This includes five key development components:

• Skills gap assessments
• Learning and development programs
• Internal mobility
• Leadership pipelines
• Succession planning

Skills Gap Assessments: Know Where You’re Starting

You must know what skills that a person needs before you can implement a plan around growth.

Skills gap assessments are used to identify the difference between the current knowledge/skills of your team and what the business actually needs. These could mean that the team lacks technical, leadership, or even soft skills.

How to do it well:

• Use manager feedback, employee self-assessments, and performance data
• Pair that with tools like a skill gap analysis tool or survey platforms
• Keep it ongoing, THIS IS NOT JUST A YEARLY EXERCISE!!

When you do this right, your talent development strategy ensures that you are fostering an environment for growth and training the right skills not just checking the boxes.

Learning & Development Programs: Growth from Within

Once you know what is missing from your team, build programs to fill those gaps. Learning and development programs (L&D) are the engines for talent growth talent growth and will need to be built to scale as the organization does.

This is what we found works:

• Online courses tied to specific skills
• Internal training sessions led by subject matter experts at your company
• Sponsoring or investing in External certifications like SHRM, PHR, or industry/role-specific credentials
• Internship based learning paths such as stretch assignments

You can also use data driven recruitment strategies to track what development efforts are linked to better performance and engagement.

When employees see that you’re investing in their growth, they show up differently with more commitment which decreases turnover.

Internal Mobility: Move People Before They Move On

Moving an employee should not be an afterthought and is a core part of a talent development strategy. Seeing a path forward for in your career is important and without it can cause employees to look elsewhere.

Pivoting employees into new roles pivoting them into other areas of the business, and stretch assignments is made easier with a well laid out talent mobility strategy. Building agility within your workforce keeps top performers and new hires engaged.

Ways to support internal mobility:

• Launch an internal talent marketplace or internal job board
• Map career paths clearly and make them visible
• Train managers to have real development conversations
• Celebrate lateral moves and cross-functional growth not just promotions

When people can grow without leaving, you win twice. You keep your talent and reduce the pressure on your talent acquisition team.

Leadership Pipelines: Don’t Wait for a Vacancy

The hard truth is, if you don’t have leaders ready to step up, you’re not prepared for growth.

A leadership pipeline is your internal bench. This pipeline is how an organization can identify potential within their workforce and cultivate them for leadership. You should not be only focused on grooming your next VP, make sure that you are developing at all levels of the organization.

What to include:

• Formal leadership training and development programs
• Mentorship and coaching from existing leaders
• Stretch projects that build decision-making and influence
• Tools like the leadership pipeline model to track readiness by level

A title does not define leadership it is about being prepared. Investing in the preparation of your employees will allow you to be less reactive when a role does open.

Succession Planning: Protect Critical Roles

Succession planning is about more than who takes over the C-suite. It’s a way to protect the continuity of your business. Start by identifying key roles not by level but by risk. Answer the question: If a specialized network engineer, lead recruiter, or operations manager leaves tomorrow who’s ready to step in?

Use tools like the 9-box grid talent management model to assess both performance and potential. Then build targeted development plans for people who can step up when the time comes.

Bringing it all together

Everything in this post connects back to your broader Talent Strategy.

• Talent Acquisition Strategy brings in the right people.
• Talent Development Strategy grows them.
• Together, they increase retention, build capability, and reduce turnover risk.

You can’t separate these pieces. Great hiring without development leads to churn. Development without strategic hiring leads to misalignment. You need both working together

Final Thought

Here’s the bottom line: your best people want to grow. If you don’t give them a clear path, someone else will.

A strong talent development strategy isn’t just nice to have it makes your business future-proof. And it’s how you make sure all the work you put into recruiting pays off.

In the next post, we’ll dive into retention strategy, pillar three of the talent strategy framework and talk about what actually keeps great people around.

Move on to the third and final pillar of this strategy – Talent Retention Strategy

References

LinkedIn. (2023). 2023 Workplace Learning Report. https://learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report
SHRM. (2022). Average Cost-Per-Hire. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/real-costs-recruitment
World Economic Forum. (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/