Effective onboarding is a huge win. But what are you doing to keep the employees you worked so hard to bring in? Turnover is expensive — we broke down exactly how much it costs to onboard a new employee in a recent post — which makes retention one of the highest-leverage goals on any HR leader’s list.
One of the biggest retention levers is growth. Do your people see a clear path forward? Can they build new skills without leaving to find them elsewhere? A real commitment to developing employees drives satisfaction, loyalty, and performance — and it compounds across the business.
The good news: the same infrastructure that powers great onboarding — human connection, engagement, mentorship, feedback — also powers great internal development.
To get a sharper view of what actually works, we sat down with four HR and talent leaders for a round of Q&A:
- Katie Bray, COO at Flying Cat Marketing, known for a pragmatic, proactive approach to employee development.
- Ray Slater, Founder of DSLX, a content and social media leader with deep experience balancing internal growth with external hiring.
- Denise Triba, Chief HR Officer at Ingenovis Health, bringing 20+ years of HR leadership at a $2 billion staffing company.
- Kraig Kleeman, CEO/Founder of The New Workforce and Kraig Kleeman Live, known for blending bold business strategy with a little rock and roll.
Their insights shape this guide — from what internal development really means, to the strategies that build it, to how technology helps you scale it.
What Is Internal Development?
Internal development is the process of building employees’ skills, knowledge, and readiness for future roles from within your organization — rather than filling those roles by hiring externally.
One quick clarification before we go further: in this article, “internal development” refers to employee and talent development. It’s a different concept from internal business growth (organic revenue expansion) or internal developer platforms (software engineering tooling) — two other meanings that show up when you search this term. If you landed here looking for either of those, you’re in the right neighborhood but the wrong house.
Done well, internal development gets people ready to be strong internal candidates when opportunities open up. It signals that employees can grow and advance without needing to leave — which protects against quiet quitting and disengagement — while giving the business the flexibility to adapt to change without a constant scramble to hire externally.
Internal vs. External Development
Cultivating internal talent and recruiting externally both have real merits, and most organizations need to use both — the question is when to lean on each.
Here’s the difference:
| Aspect | Internal Development | External Development |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Enhancing the skills of current employees | Bringing in new skills and perspectives |
| Benefits | Improves retention, strengthens culture | Injects new ideas, expands capabilities |
| Cost | Lower, due to reduced recruitment and onboarding expenses | Higher, includes recruitment and initial training costs |
| Time | Faster implementation since employees already know the company | Longer ramp-up and acclimatization period |
| Speed to Productivity | Faster — institutional knowledge and relationships already exist | Slower — new hires need time to learn the business before they can add full value |
As Katie Bray notes, the decision often comes down to urgency: “There are some tactical hires you’ll need to make where you need a certain level or specialized skill, and you need it immediately.” But she’s quick to add: “It takes at least three months for a new team member to really settle in and start to feel at home, comfortable, and ready to make an impact. You need to think: strategic roles, growth roles, or a niche skill?”
Ray Slater leans internal first, treating external hires as a last resort rather than a fallback: “I’d only look for external development opportunities if I was 100% sure no one on my team was interested in progressing into the area we’re lacking. After that, externals can bring a heap of benefits — they come with their own experiences and knowledge that can translate well into your business.”
The takeaway: prioritize the people you already have, but stay open to what outside talent brings when the need is urgent or the skill genuinely doesn’t exist in-house.
Why Internal Development Matters More Than Ever
Internal development isn’t a nice-to-have anymore — it’s a response to real pressure building across the business.
Hiring has slowed and gotten more expensive, and skills gaps are widening faster than most L&D budgets can keep pace with. At the same time, attrition remains costly, and every employee who leaves takes institutional knowledge with them. Leadership pipelines are thinning as more senior talent retires or moves on, and organizations without a bench are left scrambling.
Internal mobility is the connective tissue here. When employees can see a credible path to their next role inside your company, they stay longer, ramp faster when they move, and carry forward the context a new external hire would take months to rebuild. That’s a direct line to lower attrition, faster time-to-productivity, and a stronger leadership bench — three metrics every CHRO and CFO is watching closely right now.
Benefits of Focusing on Internal Development
So what do you actually get from investing in growth from within? Here’s where the payoff shows up.
The Power of Connection
Internal development does more than fill open roles — it strengthens the fabric of your company. Katie observes: “Internal development benefits the company, the individual contributor, and the wider team. There is no doubt that the person is a great addition to the culture, and you can continue to build on the foundations you’ve already set. It increases employee retention by making employees feel valued and given the opportunity to progress and grow.”
Cost Efficiency and Risk Reduction
Hiring externally isn’t just expensive — it’s a gamble. Ray explains: “Bringing someone new in is such a high risk, one that may not even pay off if they decide the role or culture isn’t for them. Keeping things in-house eliminates this risk and eradicates onboarding time.”
Boosting Retention and Engagement
When employees see a clear development path inside your organization, they’re far more likely to stick around. As Katie puts it: “Internal development increases employee retention by making employees feel valued and given the opportunity to progress and grow.”
Common Challenges in Internal Development Programs
Every worthwhile initiative has hurdles. Here’s where internal development programs tend to get stuck — and how to move past it.
How do you identify and nurture hidden talents?
Spotting potential is often the hardest step. It takes a keen eye and ongoing engagement to see which employees have untapped skills or leadership qualities. One reliable signal: strong human connections. When employees have mentors and buddies who know them well, ambitions and emerging skills surface naturally.
How can you design a tailored development program?
Once you’ve identified potential leaders, the next challenge is building development programs that actually fit their goals and career path — which takes real time and a deep understanding of individual needs. One approach: build opt-in development workflows that let employees take an active role in shaping their own growth.
Ensuring equitable access
A common pitfall is uneven access to growth opportunities. Overcoming this requires transparent, standardized processes that give every employee a fair shot — and technology can help here by making resources available consistently, at scale, regardless of location or manager.
10 Internal Development Strategies That Actually Build Employee Growth
Ready to turn potential into performance? These are the tactics our experts point to again and again — built into the daily flow of work, not bolted on as an afterthought.
1. Build Development Into Everyday Work
Growth shouldn’t compete with the day job — it should be part of it. Ray puts real resources behind this: “At DSLX, we provide both a budget and time off for personal development. This shows our commitment isn’t just monetary — it’s about genuinely allocating time during work hours for growth.”
2. Identify High-Potential Employees Early
Spotting future leaders early accelerates everything downstream. Katie shares a striking data point: “Our leadership team is 75% composed of individuals who were developed internally.” Denise Triba adds that her team blends organic and planned approaches: “‘Organically’ happens every day in the line of doing work. As you observe performance, you’re thinking about the talent you’re seeing and how the organization could use those skills. ‘Planned’ is about having intentional conversations around the talent in your organization.”
3. Create Individual Development Plans That Lead Somewhere
Generic plans don’t move the needle. Customized development plans — built around each employee’s specific skills and career goals — make the process relevant, engaging, and far more likely to stick.
4. Use Mentorship and Buddy Support to Transfer Knowledge
Mentorship remains one of the highest-leverage tools available. Enboarder can automate mentor-mentee pairing, so employees get guidance from the right colleagues without HR manually managing every match — accelerating both personal growth and organizational cohesion, and making it just as easy to connect people for informal support and buddy systems.
5. Give Employees Stretch Work and Cross-Functional Exposure
Denise recommends matrixed, cross-functional projects to break down silos: “Project work puts training into practice. Leaders can apply their skills to real work situations that include leading projects, building teams, introducing change, and testing communication skills.” Kraig agrees that stretch assignments shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all: “Dial into each person’s aspirations and talents to craft growth paths that resonate personally.”
6. Offer Role-Specific Learning, Not Generic Training
Denise’s team blends required and optional training through their LMS, plus classroom sessions for leadership development: “Coaching is available for leaders on an as-needed basis. These are often short engagements that help leaders focus on areas they want to improve — and areas their leader recommends would help them grow.” Enboarder can manage the logistics behind all of it: scheduling, invitations, attendance tracking, and feedback collection.
7. Support Self-Directed Learning With Real Structure
Give employees room to seek out knowledge on their own — with the right scaffolding around it. Enboarder integrates with e-learning platforms, making it simple for employees to access development resources on their own terms. Bayer used Enboarder to increase graduation rates on their L&D programs by 27%.
8. Create a Feedback System That Helps People Grow
Regular, structured feedback drives real development. Katie’s team runs quarterly 360-degree reviews: “We gather feedback from two team members — the individual contributor and the manager. We use this as part of a growth conversation to help identify focus areas to develop and top skills to nurture.” Her team also runs a self-assessment exercise mapping each person’s zone of genius, competence, and incompetence, to know which skills to build and which tasks to delegate. And feedback should run both directions — recognition matters just as much. As Kraig puts it: “Celebrate the wins. Nothing boosts morale like feeling seen and appreciated. Make sure achievements, big and small, get the spotlight they deserve.”
9. Make Career Paths and Internal Mobility Visible
Employees need to see where growth actually leads. Denise recommends intentional conversations about talent, held formally: “Ingenovis Health does this in 1:1 settings during employee performance reviews and at the senior leadership level during our annual organizational talent review.” Pairing that transparency with a clear internal mobility strategy and visible career growth paths turns development from a vague promise into something employees can actually plan around.
10. Measure Whether Development Efforts Are Actually Working
What gets measured gets managed. Denise points to a clear set of metrics: “Internal promotions, number of courses completed, training attendee satisfaction, leadership pipeline, employee satisfaction and engagement scores, and retention rates are the metrics you can use to measure progress.” Enboarder’s dashboards surface these insights automatically, so you can see what’s working without building a reporting process from scratch.
Internal Development vs. Internal Mobility, Succession Planning, and L&D
These terms get used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing — and knowing the difference helps you build a program that actually connects them.
Internal development is the broad practice of growing employee skills and readiness. Internal mobility is what happens when that development leads to an employee actually moving into a new role — read our full breakdown of how internal mobility drives professional growth. Succession planning is the more targeted, forward-looking practice of preparing specific people for specific leadership roles — our guide to succession planning covers how to build that pipeline deliberately. L&D (learning and development) is the training infrastructure — courses, workshops, coaching — that fuels all three.
Put simply: L&D builds the skills, internal development applies them with intention, and internal mobility and succession planning are where that investment shows up as promotions, transitions, and stronger leadership benches. If you’re building out an internal promotion process or supporting employees moving into new roles, our guides to the internal promotions playbook and crafting effective employee transition plans are natural next reads.
Case Studies: Successful Internal Development in Action
Pretty solid strategies, right? We told you they were smart. Speaking of smart, we have some equally sharp customers here at Enboarder who’ve put innovative ideas to work getting new hires excited about the growth that lies ahead.
Here’s how three of them are doing it.
Buddying up for Development at TomTom
At TomTom, connecting employees to their team and the company’s larger mission has been pivotal. A buddy system helps integrate new hires into the culture from day one, building a sense of belonging while making sure people have access to the information they need to acclimate and grow into their roles. Kelly Nightingale from the L&D team notes, “[With Enboarder], we were able to make sure that we made content that was worth watching and worth reading.” Learn more about TomTom’s strategy.
Mentoring and Just-in-Time Learning at Foxtel
Foxtel takes a structured approach, emphasizing just-in-time learning and mentorship in the first critical months of employment. “It’s about providing checkpoints for a leader, a new starter, and the buddy to continuously check in with each other,” explains Karina Vanderwerf. “The content is about access to tools like LinkedIn Learning and information about our workshops, because people want that just-in-time learning.” Discover more about Foxtel’s development journey.
Nudges and Support for Innovation at Sandvik
For Sandvik, innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s core to how they develop people. Employees transitioning or being promoted into new roles are supported by nudges and content delivered through an Enboarder journey. “It is very much encouraged to be curious and think of ways to continuously improve processes. Enboarder has allowed us to be innovative. It’s allowed people to think more creatively in the business,” says Kylie Cook. Read more about Sandvik’s innovative approach.
How Enboarder Supports Internal Development at Scale
Choosing the right platform for your internal development program changes what’s possible — not just how efficiently you run it, but how consistently and personally you can deliver it across the entire organization.
Enboarder orchestrates internal development in the flow of work: automating mentor-mentee pairing, coordinating role-specific 30-60-90 day plans, managing training logistics, and delivering real-time dashboards that show what’s actually driving growth and where the gaps are. Instead of development living in a spreadsheet or a once-a-year conversation, it becomes something employees experience continuously — personalized, measurable, and connected to every other moment that matters across their journey.
The result is a program that’s more engaging for employees, more manageable for HR, and easier to prove out to the leadership team funding it.
Ready to see how Enboarder can transform your internal development strategy and help you build a more resilient, skilled workforce? Book a demo today and take the first step toward a more developed, engaged team.
