According to PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer report, workers whose roles are “AI-exposed” saw a 300% productivity increase, as well as a 56% wage premium. On a macro level, industries most exposed to AI had ~3x higher revenue per employee growth.

But while practically all companies are thinking about and investing in AI, McKinsey finds that only 1% believe they’ve reached maturity in AI adoption. Roughly half of those companies’ leaders pinpoint “skills gaps” as the number-one barrier.

Traditional roles are quickly becoming AI-augmented versions of themselves. And because the tech is evolving faster than the talent base, the gap between what people know and what modern roles require is only going to widen.

Addressing it requires a professional development program that focuses specifically on AI tools and training. The easiest-to-implement and lowest-cost place to start is with an AI stipend.

What are AI stipends and how do they work?

AI stipends are fixed, employer-funded budgets that let employees explore AI tools, courses, and workflows within clear financial and compliance guidelines.

They work much like any other stipend:

1. The company sets the allowance.
2. Then defines what qualifies (e.g., subscriptions, training, certifications).
3. Employees submit permitted expenses through a structured process.

But there’s a growing demand for AI, specifically. Our 2025 Midyear Lifestyle Benefits Benchmarking Report found that “AI and emerging tech” was the #2 professional development spend category within our user base. That’s why this is so important.

Ready to kick things off? Check out our guide to getting started with AI stipends.

What an AI stipend covers

An AI stipend covers anything that helps employees learn, test, or apply AI in their day-to-day work.

That includes:

• Tool subscriptions like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Perplexity
• Courses, certifications, and microlearning
• Prompt libraries
• Role-specific software (e.g., an AI note-taker, writing, or design tool)

The premise is simple: give people room to explore the technology while keeping spending aligned with company priorities.

How employees use stipends to build AI literacy

While ChatGPT already writes most of your devs’ code, less than half of front-line and nontechnical staff use AI tools regularly. Competency and adoption levels naturally vary by department, which is why an ‘across the board’ solution like companywide training doesn’t work.

AI stipends give your people a practical way to build the specific skills their roles demand without forcing everyone into the same training track. Some examples:

• A sales rep uses theirs on a note-taking assistant for prospect calls. (My favorite is Granola, for those wondering.)
• A marketer tests out AI research tools and buys access to a prompt library.
• An ops manager invests in automation training.

And because each person is learning in a way that’s totally relevant to their day-to-day work, adoption feels natural rather than forced.

Professional development accounts and LSAs make it easier to offer AI stipends.

A professional development account is the smoothest way to roll out AI stipends because it’s already built for L&D-oriented spending. It’s a recurring budget employees can use for broader learning, tools, and skill-building.

When you fold AI into that structure, it removes a ton of administrative friction. Instead of creating a brand-new program, Finance and HR can define AI as an approved category and let the same reimbursement process handle the rest.

Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) work similarly. Their broader focus on lifestyle benefits, however, can make them less effective at specifically driving AI adoption compared to a dedicated professional development account or AI stipend.

But if you’re working with a lean benefits budget or prefer a single wide-net program, an LSA does the job while also addressing your team’s other benefits priorities.

(Based on our midyear benchmarks, some of our customers offer as much as $8,000 per employee per year on professional development through stipends and LSAs!)

3 companies using AI stipends to drive productivity and companywide adoption

Now without further ado, let’s dive into three real-life examples of how AI stipends work in practice. While we’ve redacted the company names, these are all actual use cases from Compt customers.

1. How a midsize B2B gifting platform rewards employee AI ideas

One midsize B2B gifting platform uses AI stipends as a way to spark internal innovation. Instead of limiting the budget to tools or training, they created two spot bonus stipends that reward employees who submit ideas or projects to the company’s AI Challenge.

It’s a light-touch incentive, but it does two jobs at once:

1. Employees feel recognized for experimenting.
2. Leadership gets a steady stream of practical, employee-driven AI use cases.

It’s a perfect case study in how SaaS companies can use these stipends strategically. It reduces the pressure to “get AI perfect” while encouraging hands-on exploration and surfacing ideas that would’ve never seen the light of day in a traditional top-down rollout.

2. How a small AI automation firm enables daily AI usage

One small AI automation firm takes a straightforward, high-impact approach: giving employees ongoing monthly budgets specifically for the AI tools they rely on daily. They get a $24 stipend for ChatGPT, plus a separate $50 stipend for an AI-powered code editor like GitHub Copilot.

This is exactly what to do if your main goal is to normalize AI use across the company. Engineers get the tools they need to be more productive. Nontechnical employees get their foot in the door and familiarize themselves with conversational AI. Everybody wins. 

3. How a small VR gaming studio uses stipends to fuel AI hackathons

A small VR gaming studio uses Compt stipends to power one of its most energizing culture initiatives: a companywide AI hackathon. Employees prototype new AI tools and game ideas, then the company rewards that effort with $250 spot bonus awards.

Just like with our B2B gifting client, the benefit here goes beyond the prize itself. While other companies force idea development and AI adoption, stipends create a safe space for experimentation. That leads to a culture where AI is something people are excited to explore.

What these three companies have in common

What ties these three very different approaches together is that each company started with a clear business goal, then shaped its stipend strategy around the outcome it wanted. 

One used stipends to encourage bottom-up participation in AI initiatives; another to normalize daily AI usage; another to fuel hands-on experimentation. Different paths, same underlying mechanism.

Four other shared takeaways:

• Flexible for employees, predictable for Finance. Everyone uses the budget differently, but Finance always knows the maximum exposure.
• Clear guardrails facilitate safe exploration. Employees know what qualifies, so they can experiment without compliance risks.
• Adaptable across teams and skill levels. Stipends support nontechnical staff taking their first steps just as effectively as experts refining advanced workflows.
• The same software powers every model. Whether it’s monthly, on the spot, or challenge-based, the stipend system gives you control and visibility.

No matter the use case, stipends are the reason these programs work. Had these companies tried to roll out a single corporate license or a one-size-fits-all training program, they’d have lost the individualized approach needed to get people to participate in the first place.

How to launch an AI stipend at your company

Compt makes AI stipends simple.

Inside the Compt platform, all you have to do is set up a category for AI tools and learning. Then, define the specifics of your program and let employees take it from there.

The platform supports global currencies, so international teams can expense anything and you can pay them out in their home currency. And because Compt runs on reimbursement rather than preloaded funds, you’re never going to lose out on money that’s not spent.

IRS compliance is totally automated, which your back office will love, and employees get the flexibility to choose the tools and training that make sense for their role.

It also fits every approach you’ve seen in this guide: recurring monthly stipends, role-specific allowances, and spot-bonus rewards for challenges or hackathons.

Want to see what professional development and AI stipends could look like at your company? Request a demo today.

FAQs: AI stipends for professional development

The post 3 Ways Real Companies Are Using AI Stipends in 2026 appeared first on COMPT.

Equity isn’t about giving everyone access to the same exact thing — that’s equality. Rather, equity is about giving each individual what they need to succeed and grow.

On paper, one-size-fits-all professional development programs can look efficient. In practice, they rarely deliver meaningful value for most employees. A single course, platform, or program rolled out across an entire department assumes people start from the same place, have the same goals, and learn in the same way. They don’t.

Employees bring different backgrounds, roles, lived experiences, and constraints to work. Equitable professional development recognizes that reality and takes a more flexible approach, one that allows people to shape their learning around their responsibilities, learning styles, and circumstances.

What are the barriers to equitable professional development?

Designing flexible professional development programs is difficult, even for well-resourced HR teams.

Most programs are built from internal perspective. That’s not because HR leaders want to limit access, but rather because time and budget constraints push teams to design around what they already know. The result is often a generic offering that reflects a narrow slice of the workforce rather than the full range of employee needs.

Uniform professional development programs also struggle because they ignore where employees are starting from. Some employees are early in their careers and need foundational skills. Others are deep specialists who need advanced or role-specific learning. When everyone is pushed through the same program, the result — uneven outcomes, which can unintentionally widen skill gaps — falls short of efficiency.

Designing programs that intentionally account for different starting points, learning needs, and lived experiences takes expertise that many teams don’t have in-house. And external support comes at a cost: HR consulting rates commonly range from about $44 to $300 per hour, which makes deeper program design inaccessible for many organizations.

Time pressure makes this even harder. HR teams are rarely asked to slow down and design thoughtfully. Instead, they’re asked to respond to immediate needs, fix what’s broken, and keep the business moving. In that environment, it’s far easier to deploy a single program that works “well enough” than to pause and build something more equitable, even when leaders know the trade-offs.

Flexibility is the key to equitable professional development.

The common thread across these challenges is control over decision-making.

Traditional professional development programs require HR to anticipate what employees need in advance. That expectation breaks down quickly in modern organizations because roles tend to evolve, teams often scale unevenly, and employees all face different constraints outside of work.

Flexibility changes the design problem. Instead of asking employers to predict every learning need, it gives employees shared power to shape their own development within clear boundaries.

This is why professional development stipends have become more common, especially among growing companies. A stipend creates room for choice while keeping your budget defined and predictable.

But equity requires more than just allocating dollars. Employees also need systems that make it easy to find learning options, request approval, and receive reimbursement without friction.

Our Professional Development Pro™ platform gives employers multiple ways to structure learning programs, depending on how much flexibility and oversight they want to provide. That usually means configuring a program around a few core mechanics:

• Allocate a fixed professional development budget per employee or per team.
• Define eligible spending categories such as courses, certifications, AI tools and programs, coaching, or conferences.
• Review learning requests on a case-by-case basis or automate approvals using policy rules.
• Deliver reimbursements directly through payroll for a consistent employee experience.

For employees, this creates a self-serve environment where learning is something they actively design, not something assigned to them. For HR and finance, it keeps professional development spend visible, auditable, and scalable.

Equitable professional development is an accessibility issue.

Flexibility in professional development is often framed as a matter of preference. In practice, it’s frequently an accessibility issue.

Employees don’t all learn in the same ways. Some people struggle with audio-heavy content and retain information better through reading. Others have difficulty processing dense text and learn more effectively through video or interactive formats. When a program supports only one learning mode, it can unintentionally exclude employees who can’t engage with it effectively.

For employees with disabilities, these barriers have measurable consequences. As of 2024, the employment rate for people with disabilities was 42.8% lower than for people without disabilities. Median annual earnings were also more than $12,000 lower. Limited access to learning environments that support different cognitive and physical needs contributes to those gaps over time.

Equitable professional development helps reduce these barriers by allowing employees to choose learning formats and environments that work for them. That flexibility can directly affect whether employees are able to build skills, advance in their careers, and remain in the workforce.

Importantly, accessibility benefits more than employees who identify as disabled. Many employees experience temporary or situational constraints related to health, caregiving responsibilities, or workload. Programs designed with accessibility in mind tend to serve a much broader population.

Flexible professional development budgets also support leadership growth.

Equitable professional development isn’t only about entry-level or mid-career employees.

Senior leaders often struggle to find value in standardized learning programs. Generic courses rarely reflect the challenges they face, and time constraints limit their ability to engage with long-form training.

A flexible professional development budget allows leaders to invest in learning that fits their roles, such as executive coaching, peer communities, or industry-specific forums. These experiences often deliver more immediate and relevant value than traditional coursework.

This approach works well for Compt customer TEN7, which offers a $3,600 professional coaching stipend for its leadership team. The stipend is funded on each employee’s work anniversary and allows leaders to select coaching aligned with their responsibilities and growth goals.

Professional development works best when flexible benefits work together.

Professional development alone is rarely enough to drive performance.

Sometimes employees struggle because they lack specific skills or training. Other times, performance issues stem from stress, burnout, caregiving demands, or inadequate work environments. Rigid professional development programs do not account for those realities and can unintentionally penalize employees who need additional support.

Flexible benefits help close that gap.

Lifestyle Spending Accounts and similar stipend-based benefits give employees access to resources that support learning indirectly by supporting their overall well-being. Common categories include:

• Wellness support, which helps employees manage stress and maintain the focus needed to learn effectively.
• Family support, which reduces disruptions related to childcare or elder care that may interfere with development opportunities.
• Technology benefits, which remove physical and digital barriers to performance and learning.

Compt helps employers like you offer benefits across these and other categories such as equipment and uniforms, remote-work support, travel expenses, and meal allowances. When employees experience greater stability and support, they are better positioned to engage in professional development and apply what they learn.

Over time, this creates a reinforcing cycle. Better support leads to better learning. Better learning leads to stronger performance and retention. Stronger outcomes increase the return on professional development investment.

How to set up an equitable professional development program with Compt

Equitable professional development doesn’t come from picking the “right” course catalog. It comes from how you structure choice, guardrails, and support.

Here’s a look at how it works with Compt:

Put equitable professional development into practice with Compt.

Equitable professional development is not about offering more programs. It is about offering better ones.

When employees are given both resources and agency, learning becomes more inclusive and more effective. Flexible professional development programs recognize that growth is not linear and that support needs change over time.

The more voice employees have in shaping their development, the more equitable and impactful the outcomes become. Flexibility transforms one-size-fits-all professional development into a system that treats employees as whole people and helps organizations get more value from their investment.

Ready to get started? Explore how Compt helps teams design flexible, compliant professional development programs that meet employees where they are today.

FAQs: Equitable professional development

The post Equitable Professional Development: How to Build a Program That Works for Every Employee appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

Almost eight years ago, my cohost (and dear friend) and I hit the “record” button for the first time and launched the HR unConfidential podcast. When we started HR unConfidential, we were just two HR pros pulling back the curtain on the often messy, complicated, human side of work. No podcasting experience. No fancy studio. No perfect plan. We simply had a couple of mics, lots of opinions and curiosity, and a desire for a space to have real conversations about life in HR and hopefully enlighten others on how to make the workplace better for all. 

Almost 100 episodes later, HR unConfidential has been one of my most rewarding and humbling life experiences. We’ve covered so many topics and had the privilege of talking with some amazing guests. Each episode has taught me more about what it means to build workplaces that actually work for people than any conference or textbook ever could. They’ve also pushed me to get comfortable putting my voice out there (literally) and to challenge some of my own long-held beliefs about what HR “should” be.

So as we near the 100-episode milestone, I wanted to share reflections from my podcast journey and why I’ve never been more convinced that the world of work needs brave, curious HR leaders.

The real voices of HR matter more than ever.

There’s no shortage of opinions about HR; everyone seems to have one. Scroll through LinkedIn or attend a conference, and you’ll find plenty of “hot takes” on what HR should be doing. Too often those takes come from people who haven’t actually worked in HR or even been in an actual workplace for a long time.

Don’t get me wrong — researchers, consultants, and thought leaders bring valuable perspectives. But sometimes, those big-stage insights miss the messy, nuanced reality of what it really takes to lead people, drive performance, and build cultures that last.

When we started HR unConfidential, one of our biggest goals was to elevate the voices of actual HR practitioners who are doing the work, making the tough calls, and balancing humanity with business impact every single day. For example: 

• When we wanted to discuss the power and risks of assessments in the workplace, we went straight to an Organizational Development expert (Oneka Cornelius) to hear real-life examples of how assessments might be misused and how HR professionals can ensure proper use. 
• When I wanted to learn more about HR in a global environment, we brought on two actual global CHROs to give us the real scoop about what’s alike and what’s different when leading a global team.

I’m happy to note that I’ve seen a shift in recent years. More and more real HR pros are using their platforms to share what’s working, what’s not, and what they’re learning in real time. My LinkedIn and podcast feeds are full of bold, insightful, and unapologetically honest voices who are reshaping the conversation about work from the inside out. 

That’s the movement I want to be part of; one where HR leads the dialogue about the future of work, not just reacts to it.

The “future of work” is already here.

We’ve been talking about the “future of work” for what feels like forever, and here we are, living it in real time. Work is changing faster than most organizations are built to handle, and HR sits right in the middle of that storm as part architect, part anchor.

Lately, every conversation about the future of work circles back to AI. Here’s what I’ve learned: most companies are still figuring out what AI actually means for their business strategy, people, processes, and culture. 

From helping people understand AI (and not fear it), to making sure it’s used ethically and responsibly, to rethinking how we upskill and reskill the workforce; this is HR’s lane and we are best positioned to lead the charge in our organizations. HR can help connect the dots between people and technology in ways that create real strategic advantage, not just efficiency. A couple of examples might be:

• Run an AI readiness scan: HR can lead a companywide AI readiness assessment that surfaces employee sentiment, fears, literacy gaps, and real use-case ideas, then turn those insights into a responsible AI framework that sets clear guidelines, privacy expectations, and transparent guardrails for how AI will (and won’t) be used.
• Build a skills engine: HR can use AI to mine job descriptions, performance data, and strategic priorities to build a living skills inventory that shifts performance and career development from static, role-based models to dynamic, skills-based frameworks that strengthen workforce agility and future-proof talent planning.

The future will belong to companies and HR pros that treat this moment as more than just a tech shift. It’s an opportunity for an organizational reset that calls for ongoing change management (vs. event-based), agile org design, culture transformation, and skills-based talent models that allow people to grow, move, and adapt as fast as the work around them.

Not sure where to start on your AI journey? Check out the episodes we’ve had on this topic: “Befriending AI” and “All In With AI.”

Human-centered design is the upgrade HR has been waiting for.

One of my favorite episodes of HR unConfidential is “The Power of Design Thinking in HR” (January 2025). It hits on something we don’t say out loud often enough: HR was never really trained to bring in other perspectives. We’ve been taught to prioritize control over curiosity and compliance over collaboration.

We talk about empathy all the time, yet so much of our work still happens in silos. 

COE colleagues and specialists design programs without checking in with HRBPs. 

HRBPs roll out initiatives disconnected from what the business really needs. 

The actual humans on the receiving end of the initiatives are often an afterthought.

That’s where design thinking changes the game. It’s about co-creating with your end users (aka the employees and leaders), testing ideas early, learning fast, and iterating based on real feedback. It’s about being willing to set aside the tried and (not so) true HR playbook and building HR practices that actually work for humans AND drive the business forward. 

HR doesn’t need more processes, policies, and frameworks. We need human-centered design grounded in empathy, experimentation, and humility. The biggest limitation in our field isn’t capability; it’s perspective. We’ve got to look beyond our own walls, invite challenge, and design with people, not for them.

The future of leadership won’t be taught in a classroom.

Across almost 100 episodes, one theme has been a constant: leading people is hard and getting increasingly harder. Constant change, information overload, the pressure to deliver results, all while caring for the needs of diverse team members — it’s a lot! Yet, most leaders are being trained like it’s 1999.

Traditional manager training and leadership development programs don’t work. They’re too slow, too abstract, and too disconnected from the realities of work. We send leaders to hours- and days-long workshops full of frameworks and buzzwords, but once they’re back in the whirlwind of their day jobs, what they learned rarely sticks. The 2025 Global Leadership Development Study by Harvard Business Impact confirms that “post-program sustainment” is a top challenge, with nearly 49% of companies saying that keeping learning alive after training is their biggest hurdle.

We need a different way to support managers and leaders. An approach that’s more agile, more continuous, and more human. Think learning labs, micro-experiments, communities of practice, regular coaching, and real-time feedback, not binders full of slides and leadership theories.

This clicked for me during our 2023 episode, “Leadership Trends,” with the brilliant author and leadership coach, LaTonya Wilkins. As we unpacked the skills leaders need for the future workplace, one truth rose to the surface: leadership isn’t developed through the information transfer of traditional training. It’s forged through iterative behavior change and real-world practice. 

The good news??? HR and talent development professionals are perfectly positioned to make this shift happen. Not as the trainers running programs, but as the creators of modern learning ecosystems who design experiences that help managers and leaders evolve within the flow of work, not outside of it. 

Connection is the cure.

HR can be lonely work, especially the higher your job level. When we started HR unConfidential, one of our hopes was to simply help HR professionals feel seen, heard, and a little less alone. We wanted to create a space where the conversations could be unfiltered, we could share practical ideas and insights, and folks could laugh a lot (and maybe curse a little). 

The past several years have tested the resilience of HR professionals like never before (it’s why we have multiple episodes about burnout!). We’ve been at the center of crisis after crisis, supporting others while quietly burning out ourselves. Yet, every time we chat with a guest, I get a LinkedIn message from a listener, or I’m forced to leave the house and attend a networking event, I’m recharged and reminded that connection is what keeps us going.

Community isn’t a “nice-to-have” for HR; it’s survival. When we share honestly, challenge each other thoughtfully, and learn out loud, we become better practitioners and better humans. HR doesn’t have to be lonely work. In fact, the more we connect, the stronger and more resilient we all become.

Bonus insight: Do it scared (and do it anyway).

When Gina and I started HR unConfidential, I was terrified. Terrified that no one would listen and equally terrified that a lot of people would.

Starting a podcast pushed me far outside my comfort zone. I worried about getting it wrong, not sounding “smart enough,” or saying something that makes people raise an eyebrow. I had to learn new tech, get comfortable hearing my own voice (still not there), and embrace a bit of self-promotion (which just isn’t my vibe). 

Then I reminded myself that impact doesn’t come from waiting until everything is perfect, and to just do it anyway! When you lean into your passion, even when it’s scary, it can ripple out in ways you don’t expect. Almost eight years in and our podcast is listened to in 37 countries, has beaten the odds as they relate to podcast longevity stats, and has been featured on several top HR podcasts lists.

Additionally, I’ve seen how one honest conversation or one shared insight can inspire someone or activate them to try something different: from the LinkedIn message from a listener/HR professional who shared how they started using data differently after our “HR vs. Racism” episode to the leader who told me they’d never thought about sobriety in the workplace until they heard our “Recovery in the Workplace” episode. And that’s what helps me set aside my fears every time we press record.

So my two cents: whatever you’ve been thinking about starting (a project, a business, a bold idea) just do it. You’ll figure it out as you go. Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s hitting “record” in spite of it.

In closing …

Looking back on my podcast journey, I’m filled with deep gratitude for every listener who tuned in, every guest who showed up with honesty, courage, and heart, and the global community that has supported and grown with HR unConfidential over the years.

I’m excited about what’s next. Life in HR is messy, meaningful, and full of possibility, and there’s so much more to explore, question, and create together. So please stay tuned, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to HR unConfidential wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to leave us a rating and review. 

Have ideas for topics? Want to be a guest? Just want to say hi? Follow HR unConfidential on LinkedIn and feel free to connect with me directly. Let’s keep learning out loud, pushing boundaries, and shaping the future of work one real, unConfidential conversation at a time.

The post Reflections From the Mic: What Nearly 100 Podcast Episodes Have Taught Me About HR — and What’s Next appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Nick Lush

Nick Lush is the Director of Learning & Development at BeatBox, where they build people-first programs that scale with heart. With five years of experience in L&D and people development, Nick is known for designing impactful, human-centered learning strategies that solve for the business and employee growth at every level. They’ve worked with organizations like Tandem, Included Health, and Hunt Club, and they’re sharing insights on what it’s been like to build resilient, empowered, and engaged teams.

Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.

It’s our remit as Human Resources professionals to try to balance providing the best possible employee experience that we can with strategic goals and limitation of liability. It’s a never-ending juggling act, and it’s also one that tends to miss the forest for the trees. 

There are reasons for this; obviously, many HR departments are scrambling to get by with too few personnel, too few resources, or a combination thereof. However, many departments are making things more difficult than they need to be by reacting to situations as they arise or responding to directives from above without considering the wider implications for continuity of experience. To be fair, this sort of stuff isn’t really taught in HR school. Trust me, I know. 

As I’ve gotten started in HR, transitioning into Learning & Development in 2020 after a long career in marketing, I’ve found that there are three core marketing concepts that are incredibly useful in both building and disseminating HR programs. 

Concept #1: You’ve said it once, but you really have to say it 1,000 times.

One mistake I often see HR professionals make (and I’m guilty of it, too!) is giving up on messaging or a program too quickly because it didn’t sink in right away. We forget just how busy our peers are or we overestimate how clearly we communicated something and, because it doesn’t see immediate results, we move on to the next thing on our urgent to-do list. 

One of the biggest things that HR teams can implement to make programs like employee stipends, learning initiatives, or wellness programs more effective is taking the time to map out a thorough, targeted, and “omnichannel” messaging strategy. As you might guess from the word itself, “omnichannel” is a concept marketers use to describe a campaign that reaches consumers in multiple locations: often a blend of social platforms, email, digital ads, blog posts and press releases, experiential, and even telemarketing or mailings. 

The same thing can be useful for HR personnel. What channels do you have access to? Are you a Slack organization or a Teams organization or something else? Email is a given. Do you have an intranet? If so, does someone on your team have admin access or editing privileges? Do you do engagement surveys? What about pulse surveys? All these are “channels” available to the HR team to get the message across. Studies show that internal audiences need to hear things as much as five times for it to stick and, in marketing, generally at least seven times for it to land!

For example, at the beginning of this year, we transitioned both our learning management system (LMS) and HR information system (HRIS). We knew these would be substantial changes to our team, and the integrations were being led by two different people (myself for the LMS and my colleague for the HRIS). Initially, we talked about how to make the transition as smooth as possible for our staff and how we could line up timing to make it easy to digest. After a few rounds of discussion, we finally came to a game-changing decision: What if we treated this not as two separate system transitions, but rather as a “refresh” of our employee tech?

From there, every decision got simpler: transitioning both systems simultaneously made more sense. Staff had an obvious and clear benefit of moving to easier, more modern systems. Timing got simpler; we no longer had to worry about launches “clashing” with each other, we just needed to figure out when they would happen so we could set clear expectations. And finally, we were able to simplify what was quickly becoming an overwhelming list of messaging points down to a simple set of concise talking points built around making the employee experience simpler and more empowering from a technical perspective. 

From there, we set about building a robust campaign of marketing materials, with longer, more fully detailed explanations for email and shorter, to-the-point updates for Slack. We made memes to accompany the messaging. We wrote copy that piggybacked on current events: We sent an email the week of the new “Love Island” season premiere that positioned the transition as a break up and recoupling. We sent messaging regularly, at set intervals, with varying levels of detail. We had scripts ready for employee all-hands meetings on the run up to and after launch.

The best part? Our employees met our energy: they shared things they were able to find more easily now. They encouraged colleagues to adopt the new systems, helped each other navigate, and shared trainings. My personal favorite? I got an email from our internal copywriter telling us that he “loved” getting our emails, that our copy “slapped,” and that it meant a lot to him to see HR caring about getting the messaging right.

When’s the last time you got a response to an email from a member of staff just to tell you they enjoyed reading it? By putting the employee experience first in our rollout plan, we took an initiative that could have caused frustrations and stress and instead turned it into a chance to build engagement and heighten the perception of HR as a function. 

Concept #2: Your communications should be customized to the “personas” of your personnel.

From there, you’ll want to determine how many employee “personas” you have. In marketing, personas are used to determine broad sketches of the members of a campaign’s audience who have different motivations or means of being reached. Teams use this information to build campaign assets and decide how to distribute them. 

The same practice is useful in HR: communications should probably be altered to target leaders vs. managers vs. longtime professionals vs. entry-level staff. They each have different needs in terms of informational complexity as well as various responsibilities for amplifying that message across the organization. You’re likely better off providing leaders and managers with checklists and talking points to reinforce your programs, while lower-level or individual contributor staff members likely just need to know which changes impact them and how. In all cases, it’s always useful to include a “why” that can help frame future feedback and provide some grounding for why the change is happening now. 

Finally, you need to make sure the communication plan is thorough. By this, I mean that it can’t just be an announcement at one meeting and then an email. Some of my colleagues are getting hundreds of work emails every day. There’s pretty good odds that one message might slip through the cracks and they’ve missed it. Here’s how I like to approach it: 

• Structure your “campaign” with an informational bell curve around the launch date of the change to build buy-in and secure adoption afterward. By starting broad and focusing on benefits, you build excitement. 
• As you get closer to launch, get more detailed with steps the user needs to take and screenshots or recordings to help them navigate. Distribute any training materials that are needed to coincide with launch. 
• Finally, launch messaging that follows up post-launch to reinforce the change and highlight early results or user wins that underline the change’s value. 

By having a robust marketing strategy for your initiatives, you present a more forward-leaning image of HR to the team, cut down on repetitive questions, and make more time for hearing and adapting to feedback or working through the next issue. 

All of this is great, but there’s another lesson from the marketing world that makes all of this even more effective, and that’s taking the time to map the lifecycle of your employees.

Concept #3: From the first day to the final two weeks, consider what working for your business feels like.

On the People & Culture team at BeatBox, we talk a lot about wanting to create a culture that people are “alumni” of, rather than a business people used to be a part of. What does that mean? Ask any recruiter you know; they no doubt have seen a ton of LinkedIn profiles on which people tout the names of companies they used to work for. Sometimes, that’s just because it’s a hot brand they know recruiters like to search for, but often it communicates something about their experience there and what they think it says about them. 

So, how do you build that? Well, just like with IKEA furniture, it starts with having a sketch of what it is that you’re trying to build, the parts you have available to do it, and what each step should look like along the way. 

We all likely have a sense of what we hope employees think and feel about working for our business. Most organizations have taken the time to develop a mission statement and some values to go with it. We spend time trying to build and maintain a definable “culture.” But what we often miss is what culture is made of: in a business or a society, culture is based on shared experiences, shared values, shared references, and shared beliefs.

If we want to build a healthy and scalable culture, we have to start with not just thinking about the employee experience at our business, but what the lifecycle of working for us looks like. What is the first day like? The first week? What’s the day to day like? What recognition is there for anniversaries and big wins? How are failures handled? How do exit interviews feel? These are all crucial elements to building and maintaining culture that are always better when they feel consistent from start to finish.

I encourage every HR team to spend time at your next team summit or in an upcoming team call to start to think about the phases of the employee lifecycle. Some basic buildings blocks include:

• Recruitment
• Onboarding
• First 90 days
• Advancement
• Anniversaries
• Offboarding

In the middle, you can start to get more detailed about major life events. Are you proud of your parental leave policy? Does your company offer generous bereavement leave? Are people satisfied with their lifestyle benefits? Does the usage of your lifestyle benefits indicate that they are a good match for the actual, current lifestyles of your staff? Take the time to map out what the experience of engaging those resources should look like. Document it so that everyone on the team has a playbook to work from. 

While this might start off feeling like a lot of hypothetical work and like you’re painting an overly broad picture of what employees will experience, what you’ll find as you start to really hone in on a specific version of events is that what you’re really building is your vision of the employee experience and, importantly, concrete steps to achieve it. As an added bonus, you’ll also have an easier time facilitating things like PTO or unexpected leaves within your own team, because the process for handling different potential issues is already clearly documented. 

This might all feel like a lot to take on given your team’s current workload and resources. I hear you. The list of things for HR to tend to is long and arduous. Once you get into a cycle of reacting to issues as they arrive, it’s tough to break out. But this is a situation where I would argue the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

By briefly hitting “pause” and taking time — first as a team, and later with leadership — to map out your desired employee lifecycle, I think you’ll find it makes work easier to prioritize, issues easier to settle, and presents your team with opportunities to add proactive value to your organization. 

The post Mapping the Employee Experience to Employee Lifecycle (and How Lifestyle Benefits Fit In) appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Nick Lush, this article explores how BeatBox built an onboarding program that drives clarity, scales culture, and keeps engagement high during rapid growth.

Nick Lush is the Director of Learning & Development at BeatBox, where they build people-first programs that scale with heart. With five years of experience in L&D and people development, Nick is known for designing impactful, human-centered learning strategies that solve for the business and employee growth at every level. They’ve worked with organizations like Tandem, Included Health and Hunt Club, and they’re sharing insights on what it’s been like to build resilient, empowered, and engaged teams.

Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.

When I started with BeatBox two years ago (almost to the day as I write this), the key issue facing me was pretty clear-cut: BeatBox had built a robust and tangible culture that was unique in our industry but now we were preparing to rapidly expand headcount and we needed a way that people could get a consistent, thorough onboarding experience that allowed our culture to scale alongside our personnel. One of the primary challenges that we had to contend with was the same that many companies continue to struggle with: a working environment that is fully remote.

Beyond that, BeatBox is an alcohol supplier which means that we will always be a distributed workforce; in the US, every state — and sometimes even municipalities — control their own liquor laws and there is no real way to be successful without having people on the ground in any location in which you hope to be successful. As a result, it was even more important that everyone was operating from the same playbook and able to quickly capture and use BeatBox’s unique voice, regardless of what background they brought with them into our business. 

Fast forward to today: I’m happy to share that we’ve successfully onboarded more than 200 new hires in two years through the program we built while maintaining a 95% employee engagement score. 

So how did we do it?

The Importance of Being Onboarded

We started at the beginning. Seems simple right? Onboarding is a massively important but frequently overlooked part of building a successful business, especially if you hope to build one that centers its culture as a crucial component of differentiation and employee engagement. Studies show that 86% of employees make key decisions about their likely tenure with a business within the first six months and 20% of them make those decisions in the first 45 days. In spite of this, only 20% of companies report having a “proactive” approach to onboarding, often choosing instead to let individual managers and teams get their new hires up to speed [What Scientific Research Says About Employee Onboarding — 32 Statistics and Finding, Preppio].

The risk with this approach is that no matter how aligned you believe your teams to be, each new hire is now getting a different and siloed vision of how the company works that is further subject to how that team is feeling mentally and emotionally in any given week. Instead, at BeatBox we took the time to work cross-functionally with all divisions and leaders to understand the business, understand key failure points when new hires joined, and crucial information that all employees needed and built a program around that. Every new hire who starts goes through a shared first week of onboarding that catches them up on the history of the company, educates them on current goals, explicitly articulates the culture and values, and then guides them through selecting benefits and participating in employee initiatives like our Women’s Group and employee led charitable giving program, HeartBeat. For those coming from outside our industry, there are modules designed to catch someone up quickly on how the liquor business works. There are crash courses for tech that could conceivably be new to someone, ranging from Microsoft and Google office suite products to Asana. 

Finally, we cohort our new hires into two cohorts per month, each of which also have introductory meetings with departmental leaders to understand the business, put faces to names, and share a little bit about themselves. It’s a busy first week, but it’s one that’s hard to leave feeling like you don’t know what’s expected of you or who to go to for what.

One thing we quickly learned is that managers often are confused about the expectations for them during onboarding, which are rarely articulated. To solve this, we built documents that are mirror images of each other for the manager and the new hire to have that level-set expectations and tasks for the first week and then include descriptions of how someone should be feeling in months two and three. Beyond this, we also built frameworks both in document and project management software (Asana) format to build and share 30-60-90 plans. 

The results so far have been strong: employees routinely express strong satisfaction with our onboarding program, with the overwhelming majority of them calling it the best program they’ve experienced. New hires call out their “front row seat” with leadership, the humor embedded in our training, and the structure making it easy to learn about different parts of the org. New hires regularly mention the way that our intentional approach to onboarding made them feel like the company really centers its employees, with one even going so far as to tell us they “thought onboarding sucked everywhere, but not here.”

But we haven’t sat back — instead we’ve worked with departmental leaders to understand their business units’ specific needs and built additional training material that follows the first week which guides the new employee through the specific intricacies of their function and role, up through the remainder of their first month. The best example of this being our “School of B.O.X.” sales onboarding that walks new sales hires through how BeatBox approaches the “basics”, “opportunities”, and “execution” our sales partnerships with our distributors as well as crash courses on key retail accounts at the national chain level. 

Clarity is Key to Strong Workforce Engagement

In the 25 years that Gallup has tracked employee engagement, they saw a peak in engagement in 2020 — at only 36%! From there, things have trended back downward with 31% of employees engaged on average and, perhaps more distressingly, 17% of them actively disengaged [U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low, Gallup, 2025.] Many business leaders have attempted to solve this by pushing for return-to-office mandates to recapture the “magic” of being around each other in person, but these engagement levels aren’t aberrations caused by remote work: these have been the norm for decades. 

This approach neglects two major points. 

First, in 2025, regardless of whether your relationships are primarily local or spread out across the country or world, it’s very likely that you maintain those relationships largely with the aid of remote-first tools like phone calls, texting, email. And social media. Why do we, then, assume that people somehow are incapable of forging the same bonds they have in their social life at work via digital means? 

Second, workers pretty consistently report high levels of satisfaction with the increased flexibility and cost savings that remote work offers them, why then would engagement be dropping? 

I argue the real culprit is actually an age-old problem that persists in just about any large group: lack of clarity. In the same article cited above, only 46% of employees told Gallup that they clearly know what is expected of them at work and only 39% felt someone cared about them at work. Worse, only 30% felt someone encourages their growth and development, which is an item strongly linked with retention.

By building our onboarding program specifically on the premise of providing clarity into how and why the business operates the way that it does and then moving onto how and why your role and function fits into the business, we aim to help people adjust to the business at a reasonable pace and in a manner that meets them where they are in terms of operational knowledge as they make the transition. 

From there, we also explicitly state (and restate via engagement in learning-specific Slack channels for individual contributors and people managers as well as quarterly live trainings) how the People & Culture function, and specifically Learning & Development, can be leveraged to support each employee on their journey via coaching, learning stipends, self-service tools, and tuition reimbursements. 

So far, the results have been strong. BeatBox has maintained an engagement score of over 95% both years since we introduced our onboarding program and we’ve just been certified as a Great Place to Work for the second year running as well. 

How We Turned Onboarding into a Brand Experience

Too often businesses spend loads of time and money building a unique brand style and voice only to then have a pretty cookie-cutter work culture. Sure, the tech boom of the early aughts and teens brought new workplace perks but behind those foosball tables and in-house smoothie bars have been the same ruthless annual layoffs that have been happening since Jack Welch was ruling the roost at GE.; it’s hard to care how hip your now-former employer’s social media is when you’re budgeting out your severance pay and preparing for a job search.

As we set about building our onboarding program at BeatBox, we partnered with our Talent Acquisition, Core HR, and Marketing teams to approach this program as a customer acquisition and retention project. We worked hard with marketing to understand the visual style and voice and tone of the BeatBox consumer brand and work that into our onboarding materials. 

We worked with TA to ensure that job descriptions had the same clarity that our onboarding has and that our onboarding materials were carrying a throughline from the stated expectations in the JDs. We worked with Core HR to understand the benefits packages and the cultural touchstones that made our workplace unique, and from there we set to work on building an onboarding program that mirrored and expanded on everything a new hire would have learned during the hiring process. 

As a result, we have new hires regularly going out of their way to tell us how refreshing and fun they found our onboarding materials and how they could feel right away that BeatBox is a different work environment than anywhere else they’d been, similarly to how our online presence is pretty different from a lot of our competitors. By focusing on leveraging and reinforcing the brand that our business had built in our marketing, we were able to more easily build onboarding content that could be at once informative, fun, and unmistakably BeatBox.

By embracing our onboarding program as a means of reinforcing our brand, establishing clarity, and providing a cohesive and consistent introduction to the company for new hires, we’ve been able to successfully add 200 new hires in the two years I’ve been at BeatBox while maintaining a thriving and tangible culture that truly ensures that every new hire feels welcome at the party.

The post How We Onboarded 200 Remote Hires While Maintaining 95% Engagement appeared first on COMPT.

A lot of companies want to offer great learning and development opportunities for their teams. They put a professional development benefit in place, roll out some courses, and hope their team takes advantage of it. 

But too often, that doesn’t happen. The funds don’t get used. The programs are too confusing or irrelevant. The promise of growth gets lost in the shuffle.

At Compt, we’re on a mission to fix that. 

Our latest professional development module, Professional Development Pro™ by Compt, isn’t just for employees. First and foremost, we built this with HR, finance, and managers in mind — the ones who deal with the headaches of approvals, tracking, and keeping things compliant.

We want to make professional development simple, clear, and easy to manage. No confusion, no frustration, just a streamlined way for teams to grow and for leaders to track it.

We built it off of our core product principles — and learned a ton along the way. Here’s a look at what truly went into building our new module. 

Unpacking the professional development frustrations we set out to solve 

One of the most important questions that any product leader should ask themselves on a recurring basis is, “Am I talking to enough customers?” 

For me, the answer is yes, thanks to our incredible customer success team who keep me connected to our customers so I can get a steady stream of what’s happening in the world of people ops and HR.

I learned about everything from low employee awareness to lost requests to unclear budgets and a tedious approval process. 

Low employee awareness of professional development benefits

For starters, a lot of employees don’t even know that learning and development funds are available to them. They might miss the memo during onboarding, or the program details just get lost in the noise of day-to-day work.

Even if companies roll out a solid professional development account within their learning and development (L&D) strategy, employees often end up stuck on the most basic question: “Wait, I have a budget for this?”

Without knowing what’s available or being reminded it exists, they’re unlikely to take action. And that means a big missed opportunity for both the employee and the company.

Lack of guidance on how to spend funds

Even when employees know they have some kind of professional development funds, this doesn’t mean they can actually use them. Many are stuck with a budget but no direction, or, worse, pigeonholed with a one-size-fits-all approach to professional development. 

Should they take a course? Buy a book? Get coaching? How much time are they ‘allowed’ to spend on professional development?

Others grapple with feelings that their employers aren’t invested in their professional development and aren’t given the time to learn new things at work. On top of that, they don’t know what to learn, often turning to their managers or HR for new professional development opportunities.

But the reality is that it’s unrealistic for managers and HR to know the latest and greatest professional development resources for every skill set within the company or what makes sense in an individual contributor role.

Without guidance or time, the status quo takes over, and these funds just sit there, untouched. 

The professional development approval process: Confusing at best, ignored at worst

Another problem is the actual approval process is fragmented, manual, and frustrating for everyone involved. Employees have to ask, “Can I buy this?” and then, once they do, submit receipts and wait for reimbursement. Managers and HR are left to chase approvals, process paperwork, and deal with constant follow-ups.

In fact, it is not uncommon to hear HR managers that I talk to say they are stuck with lengthy 7-10-step approval processes, and many are stuck in long email threads and Google Forms. 

The whole thing is clunky, inefficient, and full of headaches for all involved. No one knows where they stand, and that leads to delays, confusion, and a lot of unnecessary frustration. 

Not to mention, it is the antithesis of employee-focused benefits. Putting hurdles in front of your employees, who want to learn and improve, can inadvertently signal that you say you want to invest in it, but you actually don’t care about their professional development. 

Here’s what reviewing requests looks like with Professional Development Pro by Compt:

Friction between employees and HR

Another problem with having an inefficient approval process is that it forces HR into the role of ‘the bad cop.’ This usually happens when employees buy something they thought was covered, only for HR to deny the reimbursement later. It creates unnecessary tension and leaves the employee paying for something out of pocket.

This leaves HR tired of being the enforcer in a system they didn’t design and have to go along with, and employees frustrated at being told “no” after the fact. It is a lose-lose situation that makes professional development perks more stressful than rewarding.

5 product principles paramount to our professional development module (and everything we do at Compt!) 

I started off as an engineer, but quickly decided it wasn’t for me. I like building, but I kept questioning the ‘why’ and the ‘who.’ Why are we building this? Who actually needs it? 

That’s when product management clicked, and I haven’t looked back. 

It’s not about building the perfect thing. It’s about building the RIGHT thing, which is exactly what we strive to do at Compt.

Here are our core product principles that were critical to building our professional development module, and that we stick to each time we decide ‘what next’ for our customers. 

Build a solid foundation first 

We learned early on that to make a professional development module that actually works, you need to start with first principles. While this holds true for all of our products here at Compt, it was especially important for professional development, which could (and does) quickly become complex without meaning to. 

In this case, establishing a clear and efficient workflow had to come before adding all the fancy features. 

Before designing our minimum viable product (MVP), we started off with a series of flowcharts to show to L&D and HR leaders to see if what we were designing would fit their needs. There were (a lot) of presentations of these flowcharts, potential design screenshots and then from there, interactive and clickable prototypes before we settled on an early-access MVP. 

Along the way, we gathered early customer feedback and took an iterative approach to our build.

It’s easy to assume we know what users want, but nothing beats actually hearing it straight from them.

We made it a priority to involve customers from the start — talking to them, showing them what we were building, and asking for their honest input, with Compt customers and dozens of other teams who are trying to find a better way to deliver professional development.

The more we involved our customers in the process, the better our product became. Their insights kept us grounded and ensured we were solving real problems that made sense for our customers. 

By focusing on getting the core functionality right and iterating based on direct feedback, we avoided building a solution that didn’t solve the pain points our customers had. Instead, we kept it simple, collected feedback, and made sure our foundation was solid before layering on more complexity.

Visibility is key for high levels of utilization

Even the best benefits programs fall flat if employees don’t know they exist. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to overlook.

We knew that making professional development funds and opportunities visible was crucial to getting people to use them. We made it a point to embed professional development where employees were already spending their time.

This means putting it front and center in the same platform they use to access other benefits (since Compt customers are also using a combination of our stipend programs, reward and recognition, or expense management). 

The result we’re hoping to see? No more hidden budgets or forgotten perks.

User experience was also a huge part of our approach. We want employees to not just see their professional development options but to actually feel excited to use them. 

Every employee’s needs and learning styles are different, and what’s valuable to one person might be irrelevant to another. We made it possible for employees to choose the learning resources that worked for them, whether it was a specific course, a local workshop, or something else entirely. 

This flexibility isn’t just a nice-to-have. It meant much higher engagement and utilization rates because it made the professional development options truly useful to each individual.

Reduce manual work for HR and managers through centralization

One of the biggest hurdles we (and so many others) faced was the disjointed approval process. What we found was that everything was scattered across email threads, Slack, Teams, Google Forms, fillable PDFs, etc.

This meant HR was often stuck playing detective to understand what had been approved or needed to be approved. We knew we needed to fix that by centralizing the entire approval workflow into one place.

By putting everything in one system, we cut down on manual follow-ups and eliminated the chaos. For HR, this meant fewer manual tasks and reduced pressure to be the gatekeeper. No more being the “bad guy” telling employees what they can or can’t spend on. 

Managers benefited, too. They now have a clear view of pending approvals without having to chase down colleagues. 

Employees also have a transparent workflow that lets them know exactly where their requests stand, which reduces frustration and confusion. 

Ultimately, centralizing the process makes professional development more approachable for everyone. No more scattered communication or endless back-and-forths. Just a clear, simple way to keep things moving.

Reduce the barrier to entry for new products 

Getting early adopters on board quickly is critical when launching something new and gathering feedback. That’s why we double down on making onboarding as smooth and simple as possible. This also means giving customers a white-glove experience from the start.

From a sales perspective, this could look like the team getting creative with contracts and pricing to remove any friction, but from a product perspective, it’s all about getting as many people using your product at once so that you can iterate as quickly as possible.

The goal is to keep the feedback loop tight and make sure customers feel like true partners as you refine and improve the product together.

Align product features with company culture

The final piece in the puzzle might be the most important but the toughest to crack. Too often, companies treat learning and development as a one-size-fits-all solution—a set course library, standard training library, and a hope that employees will just pick something.

However, we know that real impact comes from offering choices that are meaningful to each individual.

Our approach is different and built to reflect the core values that guide everything we do at Compt. That’s personalization and inclusivity. When I think about building new features, I try to tie everything back to our mission, our values, what’s best for our users, and (of course) our company goals.

I care a lot about making sure this shows up in within all of our products at Compt.

Whether it’s lifestyle benefits that are flexible for varying demographics, reward and recognition options outside of boring gift cards or trinkets collecting dust, or professional development options that empower employees to choose their own learning adventure, we want to make sure they can.

This level of personalization is core to how we designed the entire experience. We want employees to feel like their unique needs are understood and supported.

So, it is no surprise that this same approach carries over to the organizations that see the most success with L&D, which are the ones that adapt in real time, meeting employees where they are today. 

By embedding personalization and inclusivity into our professional development module, we’re confident we’ve aligned our product features with what truly drives growth and well-being. 

Making professional development the norm for companies 

Building this module taught us a lot about what employees and companies truly need to make professional development work. The key is clarity, visibility, personalization, and making the whole process as simple as possible.

After speaking with countless customers and learning what really holds people back, one thing became clear. When companies invest in their employees’ growth, it changes everything.

I want to inspire more HR teams to focus less on the process and compliance and more on the people it’s really for.

My vision is simple: a future where professional development feels natural, accessible, and meaningful, where every employee knows their company is rooting for them. 

Put professional development accessibility front and center with Professional Development Pro by Compt

Offer the ultimate way to support direct reports with professional development with Compt. Professional Development Pro by Compt streamlines requests, approvals, and budget tracking, creating simple workflows in a single location where employees can grow and develop.

With dedicated professional development support through Compt, you can:

• Track budgets and spending with real-time reports
  
• Create employer-approved programs that include a wide variety of courses and platforms
  
• Allow employees to submit and track approval requests through a self-serve portal
  
• See and manage approval requests from a central dashboard
  
• Create custom pre-approval and reimbursement workflows

Schedule a demo to connect with the team at Compt and learn more.

The post Behind the curtain of Professional Development Pro™ by Compt appeared first on COMPT.

This all starts with fostering a culture of honest conversations and transparency.  

While I’m here for it, the truth is that nearly half of employees don’t think their companies are doing enough to help them grow. That’s a big problem — but for leaders, it’s an even bigger opportunity. 

Matthew Thomas, another guest on our Getting Personal podcast, spoke at length about the power of a manager creating a blueprint for talent development. He says, 

“If a manager does not create that kind of environment where the person feels like they can be bringing their best version of themselves, their most natural version of themselves, then they’re probably going to be less likely to continue to grow, want to continue to get better, or want to take additional training classes.”

As a manager, you have the power to change that by having real conversations, offering the right tools, and showing your team you’re in it with them. 

Ready to make it happen? In this post, I’ll share how you can show up for your team and help them thrive.

Create tailored professional development plans

Managers have a huge impact on how employees grow. 

They make or break the employee experience for their direct reports. 

A great manager makes time to understand their team, helps them improve, and gives them the tools they need to succeed. 

A not-so-great manager? They can unintentionally hold people back. That’s why consistency in how managers support their teams is super important. 

Employees shouldn’t have completely different experiences just because they report to different people.

The key to understanding how to support direct reports with professional development within the manager-employee relationship is making it personal and leading with care. Employees aren’t all looking for the same things, and a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work. 

Flexibility is everything. Whether it’s stipends for courses, coaching, or other professional development resources, giving employees options lets them take control of their own growth, and that’s what drives real results. To do this successfully, you need to: 

• Acknowledge your employee’s goals and strengths
  
• Align their professional development with business needs when possible (what can help the business today and what transferable skills could your employee grow into tomorrow?)
  
• Create the professional development and career pathway with them (we’ll talk more about this later)
  
• Track progress! Don’t just set it and forget it. 

Two major parts of creating tailored professional development plans are having regular one-on-one meetings and a quarterly growth conversation, which I call ‘Zoom Outs.’ 

Incorporate professional development into your one-on-one meetings

Incorporating professional development into one-on-one meetings is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to help employees grow while building trust and alignment.

As Matthew puts it, “One-on-ones are relationship building, it’s getting alignment, it’s checks and balances. It’s actually a true partnership. And so that helped us both very much thrive in what we were doing and feel good about where we were.”

These conversations also serve as a way for employees to reflect on their goals, map out where they want to go, and identify the steps to get there, including how they want to develop more leadership skills.

But there’s a catch: employees have to own it.

Or as Matthew says, “Your growth is your responsibility. You own that, you own your career path, you own the decisions to get better or not get better, or to be a subject matter expert or continue to improve in advance to get to the next level.”

Managers, on the other hand, should be there to guide the process. Tools like career ‘blueprints’ or ‘placemats’ make these discussions more actionable by outlining clear growth paths, competencies, technical skills, and KPIs for different roles.

These frameworks give direct reports a tangible way to see what’s possible and how their strengths align with their career aspirations. 

These consistent one-on-one meetings build momentum, create alignment, and help turn ambition into action. Here are three of my must-dos for one-on-one meetings:

• PREP! Instead of scrambling the day of or (worse) moving the meeting because you’re unprepared, get ahead of it. I like to keep a running document with agenda topics that I add to throughout the week, rather than doing a big prep session and making it a Big Deal. 
  
• Separate one-on-one meetings from growth or performance conversations. Regular one-on-one meetings work best for covering day-to-day things, while quarterly growth chats are better suited for focusing on career goals, feedback, and bigger-picture discussions.
  
  Here’s where to get candid feedback about your performance as a manager and your own management style, too! 
  
• Lastly (and I learned this the hard way), try your absolute hardest not to reschedule these one-on-one meetings. Keep them consistent. You may think an employee is flexible and OK with shifting things around, but remember that they need to mentally prepare for these meetings too! 

Engage in quarterly ‘Zoom Out’ conversations

Quarterly check-ins are a simple but powerful way to keep direct reports aligned, address concerns early, and have meaningful conversations about their career growth. It’s a key part of how to best support direct reports with professional development.

Last year, I revamped my annual review conversations to be more reflective and interactive using a template from my colleague, our VP of Marketing Sarah Bedrick. This year, I refined it again to blend her template with some of my own.

There are two big focus areas: Reflection and Looking Ahead. 

Reflection looks at goals and achievements, lessons learned, professional development as a whole, and also work-life balance. While Looking Ahead is oriented toward growth goals, feedback for me as a manager, and the ‘Zone of Genius,’ which is what we’re secretly amazing at. 

These one-hour meetings (ok, sometimes an hour and a half!) give managers and their direct reports a chance to step back from the day-to-day grind and focus on the bigger picture.

What do these conversations look like?

• Gauge how your direct reports feel about their current role, growth opportunities, and the company overall.
  
• Ask specific, measurable questions, like “How do you feel about the direction the company’s headed?” Employees rate their answers on a 1-10 scale to provide clear data points.
  
• Track these responses quarterly to spot patterns or changes. For example, if an employee’s rating drops from a 9 to a 7, it opens the door to dig deeper into what’s changed.

Quarterly check-ins hit the sweet spot since they are not too frequent and do not feel redundant, but they are consistent enough to catch issues early. 

They give your direct reports clear feedback and help them see both their strengths and areas for growth.

Be transparent about career growth possibilities 

Transparency is key when it comes to career progression. Employees want to know their options, but it’s just as important to be upfront about the realities. Overpromising a role that might not exist later can lead to frustration and disengagement, so honesty is always the better approach.

Open conversations about career paths should include the following:

• Discuss potential opportunities within the company while being clear about the uncertainties (e.g., whether a leadership role will become available).
  
• Check in regularly to gauge interest and keep career growth at the forefront of your mind.
  
• Encourage your direct reports to build skills and prepare for future opportunities — even if the timing isn’t guaranteed.

One last tip from me is that it’s important to address the elephant in the room, which is that it’s very likely your employee will eventually move on. It’s highly unlikely that an employee would be at your company or in that role for their whole career.

You can set them at ease by talking about their career more holistically, including where their future is going. 

Transparency requires balancing honest communication with actionable career growth steps.

Be aware of the Peter Principle 

The Peter Principle—where employees are promoted to their level of incompetence — remains a common pitfall in many organizations, especially for ICs moving into people management roles.

Managers can play a key role in mitigating this by creating an environment that is conducive to transparent career conversations and helping their direct reports evaluate whether leadership roles truly align with their strengths and motivators.

When I made my own move from IC to management, I was one of the highest-performing representatives in the call center. But when I made the move, the other managers were getting stellar performance ratings, while mine weren’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I was a good manager, but I wasn’t ‘great.’ Yet. 

I realized that the difference between me and the top performers in leadership roles was that they were team players, but they had boundaries. Their team and their work had to come first, rather than before when I was super task-oriented. 

When you become a manager, you have to remember that it’s not just about you, but rather your team as a whole. You are the one in charge of pushing back if you feel like your team is being overworked, and set the tone to help them prioritize. 

Avoiding the Peter Principle means helping your direct reports redefine career success. Not every employee aspires to — or is suited for — a traditional leadership role. That’s okay.

When you set clear goals together with your team with room to find their own path, they’ll not only meet expectations, but they’ll often exceed them in ways you never thought possible. 

The key is creating career paths that allow your direct reports to grow in ways that feel authentic to them, whether that means sharpening their leadership skills or excelling as an individual contributor. 

*** 

I can’t stress enough the importance of having a manager who is there to help their direct reports grow through professional development initiatives. It’s been a life changer for me and (I hope!) for some of my own direct reports over the years. 

Put professional development first with Professional Development Pro™ by Compt

Offer the ultimate way to support direct reports with professional development with Compt. Professional Development Pro™ by Compt streamlines requests, approvals, and budget tracking, creating simple workflows in a single location where employees can grow and develop.

Schedule a demo to see how Compt can help you manage professional development requests. 

The post How to Support Direct Reports with Professional Development appeared first on COMPT.

At Compt, I lead a small-but-incredibly mighty team of Customer Success champions to consult and deliver strategy, insights, and support to our global clients. 

And over the years, I’ve learned a few things. One thing that stands out: Everyone learns differently. 

My colleague, Joe, spoke about this at length in his latest post on the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all approach to professional development. And we know that professional development looks different these days. It’s no longer an online course or traditional on-site training.

But I’d like to take it a step further with actual tools and systems I’ve introduced to my team to help them learn. 

Depending on the size of your business or the structure of your teams, not everything may be possible to provide, but as a leader, you can build the foundation for professional development and career growth by breaking down barriers to access for your people, no matter what your budget. 

Managers play a key role in helping employees discover and access the right opportunities. Whether it’s utilizing stipends, sharing free professional development resources, or connecting team members to growth opportunities, guidance makes all the difference.

But what does this look like in practice?

How to provide guidance on relevant professional development resources 

This isn’t a resource idea, but rather a plea for you to change your way of thinking. Professional development doesn’t have to be a chore, or challenging.

For managers, you don’t have to think too much outside the box to find relevant materials for your team. What are the current topics you’re training on, and how do you want them to grow and develop? Depending on your specialty, there may be specific coursework or communities that have resources readily available. 

Above all, though, it’s your job as a manager to make professional development a priority.

Talk about it; make it a part of your everyday conversations. After all, you are there to help support your team, and one of the ways to do that is to continually help them develop in their career and learn valuable skills. 

Here are a few things you could consider: 

• Share curated lists of free or low-cost resources like webinars, newsletters, or blogs.
  
  
• Highlight available stipends or budgets for professional development and help employees use them effectively. A survey found companies spend an average of $1,207 per employee annually on learning and development. This aligns with our own finding in Compt’s Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, which has average benchmark budgets around $1,100.
  
  
• Identify employees with unique strengths and create opportunities for them to share their expertise, like leading internal training sessions or discussions. This helps the entire team grow while giving skilled employees a new challenge.

Providing relevant resources and professional development opportunities shows employees you’re invested in their growth. Even with tight budgets, creative solutions like sharing free tools or leveraging internal expertise can have a big impact on professional development and retention.

Let’s go through a few ideas.

Build learning systems and toolkits 

At Compt, we’ve seen professional development budgets increase year over year, and those investments mean more companies are creating continuous learning environments. 

Molly Dennen, a recent guest on Getting Personal, struck a chord with me when she talked about creating ‘systems,’ which I think applies to how you can build systems for your team’s day to day. She says,

This means building systems that make learning a natural part of your team’s workflow. 

• Encourage reflection. Help employees carve out space to think about what they’re learning. This could mean using a learning journal, keeping notes on key takeaways, or asking reflective questions like “What did I just do? How did I do it? What value did it add?”
  
  
• Provide practical tools. Whether it’s time-blocking for focus, mentoring programs, or curated learning paths, tools should align with individual goals and make learning actionable.
  
  
• Foster personalized growth. Everyone learns differently. For some, coaching sessions might be the best fit, while others may benefit from structured toolkits to help with skills like leadership visibility or value articulation.
  

Offer a professional development account

Of course, I have to talk about Professional Development Pro™ by Compt for a bit. It is a fantastic way to get a wide variety of professional development resources into the hands of your team, with minimal work on my end since they have so much choice. 

My bandwidth is limited so when I think about ways to develop my team I have to be as strategic as possible to really know what they all need.

Rather than just handing them the professional development stipend and saying ‘off you go,’ I want to make sure we are maximizing the use of those funds when possible. 

As I mentioned earlier, everyone learns differently, so it is important to know what matters to each person on the team to provide the best professional development resources.

Since I don’t have hours upon hours to research the best learning opportunities, I put out a message to the team to see where they were most interested. We see such a wide variety across our Compt clients, I wanted to see what my team in particular was gravitating towards.

My method was easy: I sent a big Slack message!  

From here, I learned they were all only interested in 4 learning types out of all the ones listed (Career Coaches/Mentorship, Online Training Courses/Webinars, Podcasts, Software recommendations).

Now I am leveraging AI and these learning types to find the most relevant experiences that will be best for them based on their strengths, opportunities, and growth in our next quarterly Zoom Out (more on that in my next post!).

Leverage free professional development resources 

Professional development doesn’t have to break the bank. Even with tight budgets, there are countless free or low-cost resources available online to support your team’s growth.

So many times, the opportunities I give my team are through sending them webinars that we might have some good takeaways from. We’re constantly learning and sharing things we come across in our Slack channels or in our weekly catch-ups on a range of topics. 

There are so many free resources you can curate, from webinars and newsletters to blogs or online content that align with your team’s needs. I absolutely love Lifelabslearning for their free webinars, and the format makes it easy to digest lots of helpful information. 

You can also get creative to boost professional growth through skill-sharing. Identify team members with expertise in specific areas and create opportunities for them to lead discussions or develop training sessions. This not only strengthens the team but also helps those employees grow in their roles with leadership skills, too.

This could be through a dedicated lunch and learn session, or you could build this into their actual goals to share X amount of articles, resources, etc. to promote continuous learning. 

Facilitate peer-to-peer learning 

When budgets are tight, tapping into your team’s existing strengths is a smart, cost-effective way to upskill. Not only does this save on hiring costs, but it also keeps employees motivated by creating clear paths for growth and collaboration.

Here’s how peer-to-peer learning can strengthen your team:

• Leverage internal expertise. Identify employees with specific skills and create opportunities for them to share their knowledge. This could include leading a team discussion, hosting a short training session, or developing resources for others to use.
  
• Make it easy and rewarding. Ensure these opportunities don’t feel like extra work. Instead, frame them as a chance for skilled employees to grow and showcase their strengths.
  
• Create mentorship opportunities. Millennials and Gen Z, in particular, value authentic, collaborative learning. Setting up peer mentorship programs can make knowledge sharing more engaging and help foster stronger workplace relationships.

As Molly puts it,

Tap into the superpowers that you have on hand. If you have people who are really good at something that is a skill or some sort of knowledge that you need more people to have, then how can you center that? How can you get that person or those people involved?

Peer-to-peer learning is also aligned with broader L&D trends like microlearning and just-in-time training. These approaches focus on delivering practical, bite-sized content that’s easy to apply immediately. Whether through mentorship programs, quick-reference guides, or on-demand training sessions, peer-led learning is a win-win. 

Lead by example 

If you want your team to prioritize growth, you need to model it yourself. Managers who actively participate in their own professional development (and know how to provide key professional development resources) send a clear message. Learning matters. It’s about showing your team the tangible benefits of investing in growth and working with them to develop professional development goals.

I think leading by example is so huge. You can’t expect your team to grow if you’re not willing to kind of put in the work yourself.

That’s because when managers take part in professional development activities, it reinforces the importance of continuous improvement. For example, brushing up on a skill, like advanced Excel, can directly benefit the team when learnings are shared.

After completing training or a course, bring actionable insights back to the team to support career development.

Whether it’s a time-saving formula or a new workflow, demonstrating how these tools improve day-to-day tasks inspires others to follow suit.

Plus, participating in growth opportunities yourself makes it easier to show employees why it’s worth their time and effort. When you lead by example, the benefits of learning become real and relatable — not just a line on a performance review.

*** 

Here’s how I feel: Supporting professional development starts with you, the manager. It’s about creating an environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and set up for success.

Whether it’s facilitating peer-to-peer learning, offering tailored resources, providing a professional development stipend, or leading by example, managers have the unique opportunity to shape the way their teams grow and thrive.

When you invest in your people, you’re building loyalty, engagement, and a stronger team. Even with limited budgets, creative approaches like leveraging free resources or tapping into internal expertise can make a meaningful impact.

And when managers take an active role in the process—whether through quarterly check-ins, transparent conversations, or their own professional development—the ripple effects are undeniable.

Professional Development Pro by Compt makes it easier than ever to design, launch, and scale professional development benefits across your organization.

Within the centralized platform, you have:

• An intuitive UI for easy submission and tracking
• Customizable forms and approval workflows
• Real-time budget/spend reporting
• Disbursement through payroll
• Tax-compliant processing

We’ve also built a global activity feed, where employees can see everything their colleagues are up to and share their experiences (think: Yelp for Professional Development).

Request a demo to see how it works.

The post 5 Ideas for Professional Development Resources (That You May Already Have!) appeared first on COMPT.

No wonder 33% of employees find it hard to stay motivated with the training their companies offer.

It’s easy to want to pass the blame to HR, but it’s not their fault. 

They’re bogged down with clunky systems and laborious workflows that make it next to impossible to deliver the flexible, personalized training that could best serve each employee. Stuck in ongoing cycles of approvals and reimbursements, HR can’t offer the flexible professional development experience that today’s employees want. 

But staying locked into the one-size-fits-all approach creates several problems that can make employees feel unappreciated, prevent them from developing critical skills that lead to becoming unengaged, or worse, make them look for a new job altogether that offers the training they’re after.

As a result, many employees miss out on developing the skills they need to advance their careers and the value that they bring to an organization through a lack of professional development opportunities.

Choosing a one-size-fits all approach to professional development is simply not the answer.

One-Size-Fits-All Problem #1: Each department has different training that’s relevant to them.

Thirty-eight percent of employees say they want training that’s more relevant to what they do on the job. But generic professional development can’t offer that to everyone. Sales has different professional development needs than marketing. Product developers face different challenges than IT managers. And new employees need to start at a different level than seasoned workers with more experience and advanced skills. Everyone needs different professional learning opportunities.

Attempting to meet everyone’s needs with blanket training or a generic learning platform inevitably leaves someone out. And that impacts employee satisfaction: A 2023 Pew Research report showed that 21% of employees are “not too” or “not at all satisfied” with the training opportunities their employers provide.

That means over one-fifth of the workforce feels like they’re getting little to no value out of professional development.

And no wonder. When the information doesn’t address the real-world challenges they face at work every day, training seems pointless, and employees become discouraged and frustrated.

One-Size-Fits-All Problem #2: Diverse learning styles and preferences get ignored.

Most people have a preferred way of learning that helps them understand and retain information. Breaking it down, here are the various types of learners, learning method, and learning process:

• Visual learners: Images, charts, and media
• Auditory learners: Spoken presentations, reading aloud, talking through topics with others
• Kinesthetic learners: Hands-on learning with activities, on-the-job application
• Reading and writing learners: Interacting with text, processing through notes
• Linguistic learners: Conversational media (such as podcasts), discussions with others
• Logical learners: Structured processes with distinct steps
• Social learners: Group discussions and activities
• Solitary learners: Independent work, processing, and reflection

Only offering up certain books for your professional development resources? What about ebooks, or access to presentations, instead? The list goes on, especially if you want to develop a standout professional learning experience. 

A one-size-fits-all professional development program doesn’t account for these diverse approaches, making it much harder for employees to reach their professional learning goals.

For example, if you’re only offering a video-based, solo-learning, online learning platform, you’re ignoring the social learners and the reading and writing learners.  

What’s more, company-provided formal training, job-embedded training, or training found in a course library can often be outdated and unengaging.

It doesn’t enable the more than 70 million Americans with differing abilities to access the same information as their coworkers. Those with visual or auditory impairments may require alternatives to text, images, or videos. And others may benefit from accommodations like shorter lessons to keep their attention or frequent review to reinforce the content.

For these employees, the standard approach to professional development and professional growth is frustrating. The lack of flexibility and continuous growth can make them feel like the company isn’t interested in supporting their advancement — which, according to McKinsey, is one of the main reasons why employees feel disengaged with their jobs.

One-Size-Fits-All Problem #3: Company-provided professional development is underutilized

We spoke with an L&D professional recently who admitted that their Coursera investment was only seeing a 10% utilization. While you don’t have to expect 100% participation rates, we see Compt clients on average getting three times the amount of participation a one-off program merits. And that’s for the same cost of their original one-size-fits-all program.  

But giving employees access to professional development funds is only a part of the problem. When employees don’t know what to do with their budget, or they only have an option that isn’t as appealing to them (hello, course libraries), utilization rate plummets.

On top of that, as we’ve talked about more in this post on broken professional development systems, the process to get approval and reimbursement for their professional development account is clunky and confusing. Here’s a sample approval workflow. For both the administrator and the employee, there’s one thing in common: A massive headache.

As a result, employers are wasting money on under-utilized programs. If employers move that investment to personalized professional development, utilization (and overall satisfaction) will increase. It’s all a part of building a strong learning culture.

The hard truth? This old approach is setting not only your professional development program up to fail, but your people, too. 

Ouch. 

One-Size-Fits-All Problem #4: Employees fail to build the skill level they need to compete in a changing market.

Skill gaps prevent employees from advancing in their careers. Yet employers are placing more and more emphasis on skills that enable companies to compete in a changing market. They’re on the lookout for employees with the technical skills to optimize user experience and user interface design, analyze complex data sets for actionable insights, and develop engaging mobile apps.

Employers aren’t blind to the problem. Forty-three percent of companies say they currently have skill gaps in their workforce, and over half acknowledge that the programs they use to build employees’ capabilities are only effective some of the time.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most sought-after skills in today’s workplace. Employers want employees who are adept at not only leveraging AI tools but also developing and training the algorithms that power them. As AI becomes more complex and more deeply integrated into everyday workflows, employees will need consistent upskilling opportunities to stay current.

But professional development isn’t rising to the challenge yet. Despite the fact that over 75% of companies are adopting AI, only 35% of talent received AI training in 2024.

And fewer than 4% of workers learn any new skills within their first year on the job, which leaves only one in four highly confident that the skills they do have can help them move forward.

The problem compounds when cross-functional teams try to collaborate, because they have varying skill sets and don’t have a choice in how they’re being upskilled.

One-Size-Fits-All Problem #5: Employee retention suffers.

Look, there is a solution, and it’s right in front of you. Clear opportunities for career advancement would be enough to retain 11% of employees who otherwise leave their jobs. And for 36% of employees in positions that offer those opportunities, training and skills development is the top reason they stick around. This is why a strategic, all-encompassing professional development program is critical to employee and company growth. 

The impact may not be immediately noticeable if only one person leaves their current role because they feel stuck in their job. 

But if employees start to exit en masse, the costs add up. 

And we know that high turnover is expensive: According to Gallup, the price of replacing just one employee can be anywhere from one-half to two times their salary. 

High turnover burdens HR with the responsibility of going through a hiring process, training new employees, and trying to navigate the growing needs of their workforce. Employees who stay have to pick up the slack of those who leave until new hires are brought up to speed. The increased workload can impact productivity and delay work on larger company goals for weeks or months.

Offering another  generic ‘learning platform’ isn’t going to solve these problems. And HR can’t be expected to create flexible professional development programs when all they have are rigid, complex systems.

What if professional development initiatives could look different? What if employees could choose their own paths and professional development plans, learn what they want, and not have to struggle through a million steps to get reimbursed? It would be a dream come true for frustrated employees and overwhelmed HR departments.

Well, friends. You don’t have to keep dreaming. Your magic wand for professional development is here. 

Professional Development Pro™ by Compt — A streamlined solution for personalized professional development.

Compt’s Professional Development Pro™ by Compt gives your company the tools to provide flexible training without burdening employees or HR with a complicated approval process. With dedicated professional development support through Compt, you can:

• Create employer-approved programs that include a wide variety of courses and platforms
• Allow employees to submit and track approval requests through a self-serve portal
• See and manage approval requests from a central dashboard
• Create custom pre-approval and reimbursement workflows
• Track budgets and spending with real-time reports

The streamlined approach to requests, approvals, and reimbursements means employees are free to choose training that meets their needs and aligns with their learning styles.

And for HR? Compt’s centralized platform puts all the important information in one place so no one has to spend hours chasing email threads to determine the status of an approval or answer budget questions. Integrations and automations create a seamless flow that can finally free you from the problems of one-size-fits-all professional development.

Start giving your employees the flexibility they want from professional development. Request a demo and start managing your program with Compt.

The post Why a One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Professional Development Won’t Work (And What to Do About It Instead) appeared first on COMPT.

Not all of us work in construction. (And it’s a good thing — you don’t want me to build you a house.) But all of us can relate to a simple concept: You need a sharp saw to cut down a tree. And when it comes to employees working to achieve business goals, the same principle applies. So how can you create a blueprint for talent development?

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Matthew Thomas, VP of People and Organizational Development at Conger Construction, for an episode of our Compt podcast ‘Getting Personal.’ Thomas shared with me about his approach to talent development and how to get organizations to make a concrete commitment to developing their people (too heavy on the construction metaphors? I’ll stop).

Here, Thomas breaks down his journey from mentee to mentor and shares the blueprint he uses to convince companies that professional development is worth it.

Getting to know people 

Initially, Matthew Thomas didn’t plan to go into HR. “When I was going through college, I took like one HR class. They talked about policy and procedure. HR didn’t necessarily move me.”

But at his first full-time job, Thomas had a mentor who was strategically setting him up for success — helping develop his talent before Thomas knew what talent development even was. And slowly, Thomas began to feel out his strengths: building trust, building relationships, and partnering with organizations or departments to achieve culture change to improve employee retention.

“Our safety record wasn’t really where we wanted it to be. I didn’t know anything about safety. [My mentor] entrusted me to take over the whole safety program.”

Thomas was responsible for learning complex rules and regulations and communicating them to the 150 employees involved in the manufacturing sales and services company.

In the first year, the company improved their OSHA recordables by 66%.

“And at the end of the day,” he adds, “we went almost 1,300 days without an OSHA recordable.” All thanks to Thomas’s mentor believing in him and putting him in a position to make the change.

Along the way, Thomas learned lessons that he would take with him for the rest of his career to help him create a blueprint for talent development. One Friday afternoon, his mentor was walking around the floor of a manufacturing facility making small talk, asking about each person’s children by name. To Thomas, this was an obvious waste of time. There was work to be done!

“This was a total trap for me. I go up there, this young punk… I’m like, these people are trying to work, let them go work.”

Thomas’s mentor put his arm around him and said:

Thomas’s mentor was a high-level leader in the organization. He undoubtedly had a million things going on at any given moment. But he still took the time to invest into Thomas early in his career.

And now Thomas is investing in others as he continues his own talent development work — Friday afternoon small talk required. 

(Pro tip: If you’re struggling to squeeze in professional development among your other on-the-job tasks, Compt saves you time by providing a single centralized system that automates workflows and budget tracking while giving employees self-service access.)

Building a leadership blueprint alongside a talent development framework

Many years down the road from that first full-time job, Thomas’s career has now spanned several industries, from manufacturing to healthcare to construction. Has his approach to professional development changed for each one, even as professional development trends shift? Essentially, no. He’s taken his lessons to heart in how to create a blueprint for talent development (and for leadership).

“You have to establish a clear strategic foundation first. That hasn’t changed. But the means and the ways of executing on your strategy have definitely changed. Online learning, automation, podcasts… all of those things are truly great and vehicles to the end goal. But the bottom line is the foundation. [It] doesn’t really change.”

Thomas puts it this way. When he walks into an organization, they first need to define their why — what leadership means to that organization. Once they figure out that foundational definition, they can build on it to create a blueprint. After everyone is on the same page, he moves forward finding facilitators or in-house experts to execute on the training. 

And one other non-negotiable? Everyone needs to participate. 

If you have high-level leaders in an organization who aren’t interested in going through something they’re sending their own employees through, that sends a clear signal about their attitude, their character, and their own leadership skills. 

Personal development isn’t something you graduate from. There isn’t a point where you can sit back and relax. This is a journey that should continue throughout the rest of your career, no matter what level of your career you might reach. 

Sharpening the saw (of talent development)

Whether people are trying to get out of professional development or they’re simply busy with their to-do list (raising my hand on that one), I figured Thomas might hear a common protest: “This is going to take me away from my work!”

He does — and for those people, he has a response prepared. Their job is to grow and develop their full-time job. That’s part of their job. That’s part of the responsibility. 

“One of the leaders of the organization I worked for once said, ‘Promotion is optional. Growth is mandatory.’ Put it on your calendar just like a meeting. There’s a saying:

But practically, how do you deliver training when people have jobs to do? Thomas thinks this is largely situational depending on what the training is. Maybe you have a leadership training course focusing on relationship building. In that case, you may just need to plan ahead to get coverage, knowing that the value of you being off the job learning for those few days is greater than the value of you being there.

In other cases, professional development training could be done asynchronously. Thomas shares an example from a decade ago that worked well for his organization: “Depending on what the training is, sometimes you have to go to your customer. We created this gamification training program that was online where people, no matter where they were, could just log onto the computer and accomplish a challenge that was sent to them.” 

By completing challenges, employees earned points that showed up on a public leaderboard. A winner was declared at the end of the 13-week challenge. (You can use Compt for a skill development program like this one.) But the important part was that Thomas helped his company achieve its goals of knowledge transfer.

“We got feedback, ‘While I was killing time with this concrete pour, I was able to jump on, do the challenges, learn what I needed to learn, and then move on to the pour.’ So it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and aligning the vehicle to the end goal.”

Break new ground with Compt’s professional development platform

These days, Thomas himself is working on his mental toughness, aiming to be someone who is a calm, strategic leader for others in chaotic circumstances. And for Conger Construction, he’s excited to build relationships and help people make an impact — in their community and beyond.

“And what that looks like is building a blueprint. That’s why I wake up in the morning, right? If we can put together that solid foundation for people to build their lives around, and knowing that I was part of creating that blueprint… that’s a purpose I can feel really, really good about.”

Create your own professional development blueprint with Compt. Professional Development Pro by Compt streamlines requests, approvals, and budget tracking, creating simple workflows in a single location where employees can grow and develop.

Schedule a demo to see how Compt can help you manage professional development requests. 

The post How to Create a Blueprint for Talent Development: Sharpening the Saw with Matthew Thomas appeared first on COMPT.