Software development services company Belatrix invests in over 120 hours of formal training per employee per year. Belatrix has one of the lowest attrition rates in the tech industry, averaging less than 12 percent, attributed in part to the attention to employee development.

Credit Karma has over 500 employees (about 80 percent of the company) enrolled in courses that run from September through November and are taught by other employees. Among the offerings are an “Intro to Coding” course for nonengineers taught by a senior engineer; “Negotiation,” taught by cofounder and chief revenue officer Nichole Mustard; and a management class led by chief product officer Nikhyl Singhal. Lindsey Caplan, head of talent development at Credit Karma, says Credit Karma University is much more than a lunch-and-learn. “It also encompasses mentorship programs that help our employees develop faster here than they potentially would anywhere else.”

The Boeing Company offers extensive career and leadership mentoring programs to over 150,000 employees. In one program, interns and new employees are paired with senior management who help them identify career goals and plans for various departments within the company. Diversity is the focus of the 1-to-1 Learning Program, where peers from different backgrounds meet to share perspectives and learn essential skills. The Boeing Leadership Center pairs high-potential employees with current leadership to learn interpersonal skills.

Retail giant Walmart takes career development so seriously that Walmart Academy is now one of the largest employer training programs in the United States. Faced with rebranding itself as a company focused on the needs of its employees and the needs of small towns and economically challenged cities, they have invested $2.7 billion in their training programs. They have raised wages for one million store employees. In recent years, more than 150,000 store supervisors and department managers have completed several-weeks-long training. These programs teach merchandising and motivational skills. Managers also learn how to better understand employees on a personal level.

An additional 380,000 entry-level workers have taken part in a separate training program called Pathways. Most of these workers receive a $1-per-hour raise for completing the course. Pathways offers retail math skills that employees need for stocking shelves and working cash registers. The academy, designed for experienced supervisors and managers, focuses on managing departments like a small business, such as preparing profit-and-loss statements.

One result that Walmart is especially proud of: An employee who started as a store janitor making $7.50 per hour was promoted after two years to meat department manager making $15 per hour and recommended by his former supervisor to start the assistant store manager program. This program could open opportunities for future store manager positions. Annual pay for store managers averages $170,000.

Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon predicts fewer salespeople at his stores, but says, “They'll be better paid and better trained.” Results show that managers who go through the training academies have better retention rates than those who do not. Employees who report to those managers stay longer. And entry-level workers who complete a new training program are more likely to remain.

Walmart, Best Buy, Target, McDonald's, and Bloomingdale's closely analyze how job roles are changing and need to change to accommodate the latest consumer buying preferences. Their training programs are designed to ensure employees in new roles will be competent and committed to serving their customers.

At Hireology, a hiring and talent management platform, two employees were promoted a total of ten times over a four-year period. Each promotion came with new titles, responsibilities, salaries, and opportunities. This example appears to demonstrate the rule at Hireology, not the exception. The company actively encourages employees to take responsibility for developing their careers.

Joanne Denenberg, currently manager of the implementation team, who was promoted four times, says:

I started in 2014 as a sales development manager. I would basically make 100 cold calls daily to get someone on the line, hopefully, who would, hopefully, set a demo for my account executive. I did that for four months. At that point, Hireology was creating a new role for an account representative. I was asked if I wanted to do it, and I did.

Julie [Rodgers, COO] gave me great advice. She said that the way to get promoted is to do really well in the job you're doing now, ask what's next, and make life easier for the people who have the role you want. I followed her advice. I did really well in every job I had. And then I asked for something new based on the needs that I saw in the company. None of the jobs I've had here really truly existed until I helped create it.

Investopedia, an online source for financial information and education, hosts biweekly lunch-and-learns led not only by leaders but by more junior employees to encourage everyone to take leadership roles and teach others their areas of expertise.

For the past decade, Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU) has sponsored job rotations for the organization's top management team. Each rotation lasts nine months, and successful applicants for the twenty slots are chosen on a competitive basis by Navy Federal's COO. These managers spend part of the rotation doing hands-on work in branch offices and the call center, and part of their rotation in a classroom setting. According to NFCU, these rotations of top management help the company grow its talent internally and provide participants with a real sense of accomplishment.

Computer networking subsidiary Cisco Systems GmbH, based in Hallbergmoos, Germany, enables its 3G values of grow the business, grow your team, and grow yourself by ensuring employee access to the vital 3Es: education, experience, and exposure.

Managers at Johnson & Johnson health-care products company select high-potential individuals they believe could run a business (or a bigger business) in the next three years to participate in their development program they call LeAD. The program lasts nine months and during that time, participants receive advice and regular assessments from a series of coaches brought in from outside the company. Each participant must also develop a growth project—a new product, service, or business model—intended to create value for their individual units. Each candidate's progress is evaluated during a leadership session that is held in an emerging market such as China, India, or Brazil in order to increase participants' knowledge of the company's global operations. Graduates leave the program with a multiyear individual development plan and are periodically reviewed by a group of senior HR heads for further development and reassignment across the corporation. Johnson & Johnson managers believe that the LeAD process has accelerated individual development. More than half of the LeAD participants moved on to bigger positions in the company during the first three years after graduating from the program.

Procter & Gamble's flagship Family Care division identified a set of complex, high-impact positions that offered particularly quick development and learning opportunities for its high-potential candidates, for instance, “brand manager for a leading product” or “director of marketing for a new segment or region.” Division managers dubbed these key positions “crucible roles” and began a concerted effort to fill 90 percent of those positions with high-potential employees. Candidates had to pass through three screenings to be eligible: (1) adequate qualifications to perform well in the particular crucible role, (2) stellar leadership skills, and (3) a clear developmental gap the crucible role could help them fill. Through this program, P&G has measurably increased the percentage of employees qualified for promotion: More than 80 percent of P&G's high-potential employees are ready to take on critical leadership roles each year—putting the company at a tremendous talent advantage when leadership roles need to be filled.

There's no doubt that the largest percentage of an employee's development often comes from the job they are doing, challenges they have to overcome, and new skills they have to develop. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly of Indianapolis, Indiana, structures learning and development opportunities for new MBA grads accordingly: Their chairman and CEO John Lechleiter describes the recipe for the company's approach to leadership development as two-thirds coming from job experience, one-third from mentoring and coaching, and a pinch of classroom training.

Eli Lilly has found a unique way to provide its managers with the benefits of participating in different jobs while staying in their same positions. The company offers managers short-term work assignments outside their field of interest or expertise, while remaining in their current jobs. According to Lilly, managers are happy about the opportunity to expand their career skills and company knowledge without having to move to a different location or take on a long-term assignment elsewhere.

At Epson, the Japanese electronics company, employees can do “executive internships” in which they spend a dedicated period of time working with company executives at different levels, learning how they spend their time, decisions they make, and so on before returning to their original position. Such a practice helps employees to see how their job relates to larger objectives in the organization.

UPS makes employee development a primary management responsibility for all its managers, who work on developing specific development plans in collaboration with each of their direct reports.

At Land's End in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, any employee requesting to work in another department are placed there for two weeks, after which they can chose to make the move permanently.

At Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina, professional employees of similar pay grade can swap positions with each other. These strategies make it easier to keep employees who might otherwise choose to leave the companies.

Gerard Kleisterlee, former executive vice president and co-chief operating officer of Phillips Electronics, had three priorities when he traveled: meet local management, meet a key customer, and have lunch with a high-potential manager.

A five-year study of 1,000 Sun Microsystems employees found that 25 percent of mentored employees received salary grade changes, compared to only 5 percent of the control group. Those who were mentored were found to have been promoted six times more often than others.

Brazil's largest cosmetics company, Natura Cosméticos of Sao Paulo, identifies promising leaders from within the organization and assigns them to shadow a high-level Natura executive for three to six months.

Rather than singling out individuals to develop as leaders, mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia Corporation of Espoo, Finland, focuses on developing teams of leaders—building their interpersonal communications and consensus decision-making skills.

To help improve the effectiveness of its leadership training efforts, General Electric Corporation of Fairfield, Connecticut, now trains entire teams of employees rather than just individuals. Chairman and former CEO Jeffrey Immelt believes this approach is having a significant impact on how much of what gets taught actually gets used on the job. Says Immelt, “At the GE I grew up in, most of my training was individually based. I could use only 60 percent of what I'd learned because I needed others—my boss, my IT guy—to help with the rest.” With the change to team-based training, according to Immelt, “There's no excuse for not doing it.”

Food manufacturer General Mills makes serving on a nonprofit board of directors a part of their development plans. The company believes that the service is a good way to build leadership skills among employees.

CEOs at two of America's top companies are personally involved in monitoring the development of promising employees. General Electric chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt keeps tabs on the development of the company's top 600 managers, while McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner regularly reviews the development of the company's top 200 managers.

Rockwell Collins, the aviation and defense company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, matches mentors and high performers using a web-based program.

Home-improvement chain Home Depot has implemented their Product Knowledge Recognition program to help get employees excited about learning detailed information about products carried in the company's stores. Each of Home Depot's departments, such as electrical or plumbing, has its own guide that contains more than 100 product-related questions. To be considered an expert in a particular department and receive a product-knowledge badge, employees have to correctly answer these questions. New employees are given ninety days to become an expert in their department's product knowledge, at which time they earn an increase in their base salary. After becoming an expert in their own department's offerings, Home Depot provides additional financial incentives to encourage employees to become experts in and receive product-knowledge badges for other departments.

IBM has three distinct mentoring programs: expert mentoring, career mentoring, and for new hires, socialization mentoring.

At Merrill Lynch Realty/Relocation Management Division of White Plains, New York, the company splits its in-house training programs into two different pieces: one for new employees and one for experienced employees. New employees are given forty hours of teaching in every part of the real estate and relocation field—all during regular working hours. Experienced employees are provided with training designed to help them move up in the organization. Aside from extensive formal classroom training, Merrill Lynch Realty/Relocation uses on-the-job training and pairs new employees up with experienced employees to accelerate the training process.

The Yellow Pages Group of Verdun, Quebec—Canada's largest publisher of electronic and print telephone directories—subsidizes up to $2,000 of employee tuition fees for courses taken outside the company each year.

When an employee at Home State Bank in Loveland, Colorado, decided she wanted to eventually open her own jewelry store, the company's human resources manager encouraged her to view her work at the bank as a training ground for the skills she would need to someday run her own business. As a result, the employee's attitude shifted from “I'm not where I want to be” to “I'm learning the things I need to eventually succeed with my long-term dream of owning my own business.” Home State Bank's openness with employee goals—both within and outside of the business—has led to higher worker morale and a turnover rate that is half the industry average.

When it became apparent that it would be difficult for Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, the casual-dining restaurant chain based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, to continue to improve its already well-honed systems, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer Michael Woods decided to run a group of the company's vice presidents through Six Sigma training. None of the vice presidents worked on the operations side of the business. After the training, Woods assigned a project to test their Six Sigma skills. The project dealt with the delivery of milk shakes, which took more than four minutes to get to customers from the time they were ordered. Initially, the team consulted with the experts. One expert said the problem was the milk shake machines; the machine's capacity could not meet customer demand. Another expert said the problem was an insufficient number of spindles. The third expert felt it was a labor shortage during peak hours. The team used Six Sigma to measure all parts of the process, from the time the milk shake was ordered to the time it was delivered. Upon data analysis, the team discovered that the problem wasn't with making the milk shakes quickly, it was that no one took the milk shakes to customers after they were made. After implementing a small change to the order pickup system, Red Robin went from 32 percent on-time milk shakes to 76 percent.

The Routes of Knowledge training program for employees at automobile manufacturer Ferrari S.p.A. of Maranello, Italy, uses the themes of travel and exploration as it covers topics from computer and language skills to technical training. Specific training is linked to individual explorers: Marco Polo for worker's training, Charles Lindbergh for manager's institutional training, and Neil Armstrong for leaders' continuous training. At Campus Ferrari—a meeting that focuses on teaching Ferrari's rich history—employees participate in multimedia presentations with titles such as “Do You Know Your Company?” and “Travel Into Ferrari's History.” The event ends with a dinner at which employees explore innovation and creativity. The company's Creativity Club uses employee meetings with artists, actors, chefs, and others to stimulate worker creativity and innovation.

New York financial services firm Citigroup created the Mobility Initiative to better identify and take advantage of its large pool of internal talent. The Mobility Initiative consolidated the company's eighteen different job-posting websites into one global job-posting site—making it far quicker and easier for employees to search for open jobs throughout the company. The initiative also established a set of mobility guidelines with criteria for moving to different positions and the creation of more effective career development tools.

At Valero Energy Corporation of San Antonio, Texas—the largest independent oil refinery in the United States—promising junior employees are placed on the management fast track via the company's accelerated development program. Selected employees are assigned to mentors and specifically trained to fully assume their responsibilities when they retire or move up in the organization themselves. Coupled with an aggressive college recruitment program, Valero is able to offer young employees a clear career path to upper-management ranks—keeping them active and engaged in their jobs.

Merck, Sharp, and Dohme, the UK-based subsidiary of pharmaceutical company Merck in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, uses their Talent Management Wheel program to develop future leaders. Through this program, the director group is given a list of ten future leaders within the organization whom they are responsible for providing with developmental opportunities.

At North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System of Great Neck, New York, employees at every level of the organization are encouraged to expand their skills. In a recent year, the organization invested $10 million in worker training and tuition reimbursement to help facilitate the process. As a result, the organization has increased its one-year retention rate to 96 percent, patient satisfaction scores have been on the upswing, and it's not rare to encounter surgical team technicians who started out as housekeepers or secretaries.

Online-gaming company World Golf Tour pairs every employee of the company with a senior manager whose job it is to mentor the employee during the course of weekly meetings set up specifically for this purpose.

Every three months the human resources department of Home State Bank sends an email to all employees asking if they're feeling stuck in their jobs or want to acquire new job skills. Employees who respond yes to the email messages receive a personal visit from one of the bank's training or human resources specialists to review career and training options.

At FKP Architects in Houston, Texas, employees are paired with a company principal through the My Principal program. The principals help their assigned employees with career development, and they discuss salaries and prospects for promotion within the firm.

Realizing that hiring from outside can send a powerful message to junior employees about the lack of future opportunities within a company, German industrial and steel company ThyssenKrupp AG of Dusseldorf designed several rigorous processes to ensure that promising junior employees were ready to advance to opportunities of greater responsibility. To create cross-segment transparency and consistency, the company identified and clarified seven key management competencies. Subsequently, they developed a standardized appraisal process. In addition, the company created a central placement process for its top 300 managers. This process serves to promote mobility among the company's five business segments while accelerating the development of leaders throughout the organization.

At Beaverbrooks the Jewellers, most managers and assistant managers have been promoted from within the organization and not recruited from outside of it.

Computer networking subsidiary Cisco Systems GmbH has created a variety of employee networks to help underrepresented groups rise up the company ranks. These networks include the Women Access Network (WAN), Cisco Black Employee Network, Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Resource Group, and the Conexión network for Latino employees.

At Quicken Loans, employees receive 100 percent reimbursement for continuing professional education, and scholarships are available for children of employees.

Some companies take employee development to an extreme. Shipping giant Maersk sends its people overseas for three years to attend classes and learn more about the world of global shipping.

The Container Store cites its employee training programs as a major factor in retaining employees. New hires get 185 hours of training during their initial year. No other company in the industry offers as much training.

The Container Store pays based on an employee's contribution to the success of a store rather than on their position. This permits employees in nonmanagement positions to earn as much as those in management positions. Fernando Ramos was in a manager position for three years and had been promoted to it from a sales position. But Ramos wanted to be on the floor selling, so a new position for selling and training was created for him. “I go to all the store openings to show the new people how to generate excitement on the sales floor,” explains Ramos.

Executives at Razorfish noticed a troubling trend. During exit interviews, exiting employees complained that their main reason for leaving was that they didn't see good career opportunities. Dee Fischer, director of organizational development, and her colleagues conducted the company's first annual Career Month in September 2010. It provided employees with access to thought leaders, career-related learning opportunities, cross-discipline networking, and an online CareerLab portal. “We want our employees to take charge of their own careers,” says Fischer.

All eighty employees at Techmetals, a small metal-plating company in Dayton, Ohio, are involved in plant layout, scheduling, and delivery; rather than having just one piece of the puzzle, they work in teams.

After every team meeting, Diane Belcher, senior director of product management at Boston-based Harvard Business Publishing, asks team members to share their learnings from the meeting. More importantly, she asks them how the learnings can help further develop their roles and how they can improve client service.

Norse, a soft facilities management company, originally set up a learning program to improve literacy and numeracy among frontline workers, but its success led Norse to establish a training academy to support career development. Tricia Fuller, group HR director, says it has been important in changing the psychological contract between employees and managers, with employees reporting that they feel valued and believe they have a future with the organization.

Microsoft India tries to provide opportunities to all its employees to work across various roles, such as sales, marketing, business process outsourcing, software development, and research.

Taj Hotels established potential assessment centers to ensure career growth. The centers, along with managers, identified high performers and sent them to intensive mini-MBA programs that train them outside their area of work experience to develop them for future management positions. Taj also provides opportunities for supervisory and managerial personnel through a Career Development Committee that grooms them to prepare for higher-level positions.

After realizing that as many as 25 percent of employees quit to pursue higher education, many Indian business process outsourcing companies (companies that provide outsourced services for US companies), such as Wipro Spectramind and TransWorks formed partnerships with educational institutions and designed courses to meet the needs of the industry, allowing employees to keep working while attaining an education and providing a deeper talent pool for the companies.

Hotel management firm Winegardner & Hammons invests in its people and their long-term growth with training and internship opportunities to help them reach their professional goals. The company is also committed to promoting qualified candidates from within.

At Tata Consultancy Services, employees have the opportunity to work in multiple sectors, with different technologies, and across diverse teams in order to gain exposure to all aspects of the company and industry. Employees are always learning and experiencing something new and developing new talents and skills, according to HR director Nupur Mallick.

A Mars employee in the Netherlands explains his company's career paths: “Mars gives everyone in the business the chance to grow. Each year, we are given the opportunity to develop our skills and prepare ourselves for our next move within Mars. Everything is possible career-wise: horizontal, vertical, cross-segment, cross-site, cross-department moves are all strongly supported by management.”

Google has pledged $1 billion to its Grow with Google initiative that will help retrain people who may lose their jobs due to artificial intelligence. Google is sponsoring 50,000 Udacity scholarships for Android and web development, split between new and experienced developers. To help retrain 1.2 million people over a three-year period, the company has engaged Goodwill Industries.

Owens Healthcare offers employees the chance to shadow their coworkers for up to half a day. This program allows employees who are interested in a career change a chance to see what other positions in the company are actually like.

Employees at Let's Play Sports in San Diego have an opportunity to meet with executives every Friday to discuss MBA-level content. Executive coaching is offered to employees who meet certain qualifications, and an annual conference is offered to improve leadership abilities.

At UK-based Norse Group, any manager can request a meeting with the group HR director to request training and support for personal development. Frontline employees also have the opportunity for additional training. Norse has its own training academy, which supports career development, health and safety, and cost reduction. The results are very promising. Employees feel more valued by the company, and they see themselves having a future there.

To provide career development for their employees, LinkedIn offers a global job rotation program called [in]cubator, an idea incubator. Four times throughout the year, anyone or any team can present a product idea to executive management. The only stipulation is that the proposal must serve the needs of customers or fellow workers. Once an idea is approved, an executive mentor is assigned to the individual or team. They are allocated a maximum of three months to work exclusively on the project.

To help employees learn more about its products, Wegmans supermarkets, based in Rochester, New York, provides flexible work hours, special assignments, world travel, and college scholarships. The company is also committed to promoting from within, with two-thirds of job vacancies filled by current employees. As a result, turnover has dropped to 4 percent, compared to 100 percent for the industry overall.

Employees at Whole Foods have greater control of their career path compared to employees of competitor stores. To help increase awareness of career options, the company posts all promotional opportunities and new jobs. They also encourage employees to select their teammates. Company statistics show that 90 percent of management were promoted from within.

New York–based Deloitte & Touche offers the Future Leaders Apprentice program to new hires. The program is designed to help employees plan their future and further develop essential skills they will need.

Saudi Telecom of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, rotates 25 percent of its organization into different positions each year.

At REI, surveys revealed that skill building was very important to twentysomethings, whereas older employees wanted clear opportunities for career advancement. To satisfy the hunger for growth, REI no longer relies solely on on-the-job training, but also offers formal management training and development classes. The result has been lower turnover costs than industry averages for retail.

Each month at REI's headquarters and distribution center in Kent, Washington, the training and development team hands out copies of business-related and other books to each department. The Pass It Forward reading program makes it easy—and free—for employees to absorb ideas in classic business tomes, as well as the latest bestsellers.