Most companies nowadays have employee development programs to help employees improve their skills and hone their expertise. Among other perks, employee development has also become the most desired ones, with LinkedIn report showed that more than 90 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if the company invested in their careers. The good news is, more and more leaders are doing real action to improve employee engagement in many tangible ways.

However, providing development without purpose is not enough for business to thrive in today’s competitive world of work. Organisation does have goals, and in such a case, goals and development should come together to create a harmonious success. Aligning employee development with business goals can also give a positive impact on both organisations and employees in terms of performance. When your training aligns with business, employees surely will understand expectations better, can operationalise vision and values, as well as recognise what is necessary to succeed.

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So, have your employee development program aligned with your business vision and mission?

If you shake your head to the question, you should change your development strategy and leverage your perspective now. Deloitte University Press conducted research about talent development that aligns with company’s vision in three different nations (India, China, and Brazil) using three different approaches. Each approach can tell you on what development you should implement and change in your organisation. So, as it requires a good deal for businesses to work of a robust talent development strategy, you can adapt these three approaches and have a better training program that eventually drives business triumph.

Approach #1 Strengthen foundational talent management practice

In this strategy, you should be able to identify the foundation of your management practice in order to effectively provide a source for the training program. A continuous performance conversation might be needed to establish clear goals, expectations, and decisions used for development. 

Approach #2 Develop and communicate a business-aligned talent strategy

After identifying your talent and management strength, you should develop an integrated, business-aligned, data-driven talent strategy that is widely understood throughout the organisation. You should also create a two-way relationship between employees and leaders concerning talent needs, including effectively managing talent acquisition, ensuring high-quality conversations about succession management and development, and providing employees with the tools and resources they need to make important data-driven decisions and to communicate with the organisation.

There should also be a commitment to making a targeted environment that is personally engaging and stimulating to create better training environment. For example, you can you are trying to upskill your employee’s marketing strength. Therefore, you should create a simulation that aligns with marketing.

Approach #3 Invest in critical management areas

Lastly, an organisation should invest in development activities that individual employee experience. For instance, if you are training your customer service staff, you should align the activities with hospitality, attentiveness, communication skills, and other skills needed to be better customer service.

Other than that, the integration of development policies and procedures should also be your concern. There should be a number of influential policies and procedures that senior individuals decide upon and implement that align with employee skill area. For example, you can create a new policy regarding development management strategy in a critical area such as human resources. Your new policy, however, should be approved and implemented by senior individuals as a role model for their junior staff or new hires.

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