How to boost employee engagement with education benefits and professional development opportunities

Employees are engaged when you invest in their education and growth.

Providing education benefits to your workforce is not just a “perk” — it's a strategic business decision that contributes to building a workforce that is:

• Agile

• Motivated

• Engaged

Not only do these benefits motivate individuals to stay longer at their company as they complete their education, they also foster mental and emotional engagement as employees recognize their company’s investment in their growth. Research has shown that employees who see opportunities to learn and grow are 2.9x more likely to be engaged compared to those who don’t see those same opportunities.

"You don't always get the opportunity to do things like [Target and Guild's career mobility program] when you're a frontline worker. So a company that does that for you is a company you're going to want to work hard for. This is life changing because it opens up a lot of opportunities for me."

Janice A., Guild learner and Executive Team Lead, Specialty Sales at Target

The chance to pursue educational goals can ignite a sense of purpose and ambition in employees, whether their path entails:

• Earning a degree

• Acquiring a new skill

• Gaining a certification or career diploma

• Enhancing digital literacy

• Learning English as a second language

Education benefits send a message to employees that the organization values them, improving overall morale among the workforce.

Engaged employees create cultures of continuous learning and innovation.

Offering education benefits anchored on career growth in particular helps promote a culture of continuous learning, the most important skill for an unpredictable technological future.

When learning connects to advancement opportunities within the company in a thoughtful and intentional way, employees see not just the potential to meet educational goals but to grow their careers as well. Whether they’re looking to pursue their passion, find a more flexible role, or increase their earnings, they should be able to follow their unique paths to advancement.

This leads to happy and engaged employees who are motivated to keep learning and growing, all the while gaining the skills their employer needs and fueling innovation and organizational agility in the process. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Research from The Josh Bersin Company backs this up, finding that the singular most impactful practice for driving business, talent, and innovation outcomes is “creating extensive opportunities for career growth.”

The #1 most impactful practice for driving business, talent, and innovation outcomes is creating extensive opportunities for career growth.

As employees seize these opportunities, they gain new skills and adapt to changes in the industry — helping keep their organization at the forefront of its field as well.

What type of education benefits lead to employee engagement?

Education benefits provide an avenue to invest in employee growth, whether that’s through:

• Skill enhancement

• Career advancement

• Personal development

Here are five key hallmarks of education benefits frameworks that drive employee engagement.

1. Education benefit options should be as diverse as your employees.

Your workforce is full of unique individuals with different needs, preferences, goals, and backgrounds across all levels — from frontline workers to leadership. Companies also benefit from engaging the diversity of perspective and experience in their workforce to drive innovation and better represent the broadness of their customer base.

While the importance of bachelors and higher education degrees still remains, there are other learning options like bootcamps, certificates, and short-form courses offering accessible, equitable onramps for your entire workforce towards skill and career growth. These programs can help employees:

• Take on a leadership role

• Get better and stay up to date at their current job

• Improve soft skills like customer service

• Build relevant knowledge and ability for jobs in the future of work (think AI)

• Pivot into a new field or department entirely

Start by aligning learning paths to career growth opportunities that fill skill gaps. To better serve a diverse workforce, learning options might include a mix of:

• Associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degree programs

• Skills-based courses

• Short-form certifications, career diplomas, and bootcamps

2. Education benefits should be flexible.

In addition, education benefits should focus on flexibility and accessibility to meet the needs of working adults juggling:.

• Work

• School

• Family

• Caregiving

• …and more.

To ensure better program adoption and engagement across your workforce, HR leaders should design education benefits with these key factors in mind:

• Offer online courses

• Include part-time programs

• Provide asynchronous learning opportunities

• Ensure manager adoption to support employees while working and learning

3. Education benefits should include tuition assistance.

Employers who are considering tuition reimbursement vs. tuition assistance programs should carefully consider how payment options impact employee participation. Tuition reimbursement requires employees to pay out-of-pocket for education with the hope of being reimbursed later, while tuition assistance allows employees to enroll in classes with the employer covering either a portion or full cost of the program up front.

Because tuition assistance programs either reduce or eliminate the need for employees to pay out of pocket, they remove a significant — and inequitable — barrier to entry.

According to a Guild survey, 3 out of 4 employees who do not hold an undergraduate degree select tuition assistance over tuition reimbursement programs when their employers offer both funding options, increasing to 9 out of 10 for employees with no college experience.1

4. Education benefits should come with technical and emotional support.

As we lay out in a blog post on the “own your own development” fallacy, employees will be more successful in pursuing education and navigating their careers if they have support.

That starts with technical support — it should be easy for employees to access the benefit and navigate their options. Consider using interactive quizzes and assessments for employees to explore both learning programs and the resulting career options available to them.

In terms of personal and emotional support, a formal mentorship program can help employees:

• Reach their goals faster

• Overcome challenges

• Gain industry-specific knowledge

In addition, having a dedicated coach to provide 1:1 career and education guidance — along with the nitty gritty on options, application, and enrollment — can help keep employees motivated and accountable. Coaches can also provide emotional support to individuals who aren’t the typical university student or corporate learner.

5. Education benefits should align to business needs to best support career growth.

Education benefits have the most impact on employee engagement when they unlock career opportunities, and to do that, learning programs should align to strategic business needs. This ensures that workers have roles to move into as they build new — and needed — skills.

For example:

• Companies ramping up delivery operations need more supply chain managers

• Organizations tackling digital transformation need a broad range of technical skills

• Retail stores opening new locations need new frontline managers and store leaders

• Every company needs a range of AI training at every level

This creates a virtuous cycle: individuals pursue education that unlocks career advancement within their company, while organizations build internal talent pipelines for hard-to-fill roles.

“The business is reaping the benefits because we’ve created this organic talent pipeline right from associates who know Walmart, who know our markets. And we’re just skilling them in a different way, utilizing those same individuals … and placing them in hard-to-fill or expensive-to-fill positions.”

Beth Williams-Moore, Director of Live Better U at Walmart

Attracting and retaining talent with education benefits

In addition to better engaging and retaining your current workforce, well-designed education benefits can also be a powerful lever to attract new talent.

According to Guild research, 74% of workers polled said they would be “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to leave if offered additional education or career opportunities elsewhere. To attract — and keep — the employees your business needs, offer them the skills and growth they want.

Promoting education benefits can help boost applicants.

A Harvard Business Review article profiles the success of The Walt Disney Company’s education benefit with Guild, known as Disney Aspire. All full-time and part-time workers in the U.S. can pursue education, with Disney fully funding tuition costs upfront.

Here’s the impact: 1 in 4 applicants for hourly positions say they’ve applied to Disney because of access to education, training, and career pathways.2

1 in 4 applicants for hourly positions say they’ve applied to Disney because of access to education, training, and career pathways.

Employees stay when they see opportunities to move up and around the company.

Workers are more likely to stay with an employer if they know that they — and in some cases, even their spouses and dependents — can have their education fully funded by their employers.

This is an even more powerful offer when workers also see opportunity to grow their careers and move up and around the company.

The proof is in the numbers.

Guild found that employees engaged in education benefits through our Learning Marketplace, our pre-vetted catalog of learning programs, were 2.3x less likely to leave their employer in the last 12 months relative to non-members.3

What’s more, Guild members — or employees who have created an account but aren’t yet enrolled — were 1.8x less likely to leave their employer in the in the last 12 months relative to non-members.4

That means retention improves at no cost to the employer.

Guild members were 1.8x less likely to leave their employer in the last 12 months relative to non-members — at no cost to the employer.

Attract, retain, and train tomorrow’s leaders.

Education benefits also help organizations identify and cultivate future leaders within the organization.

When employees can access the skills needed to move into management and leadership roles, they see a path to higher wages and career growth. When Guild worked with both retail leaders and learning partners to build a new skilling solution for frontline management and leadership, thousands of employees enrolled.

Organizations, in turn, are better able to grow their business and adapt when they have the right leaders in place.

Measuring the impact of education benefits on employee engagement

Education benefits are an investment in talent strategy — and, as we describe in our infographic on 5 proven value drivers, can provide measurable ROI when strategically designed.

By engaging and growing employees, organizations see improvements in:

• Reduced turnover

• Talent attraction

• Brand

• Other factors such as DE&I outcomes

• Internal mobility

Improved retention is a major driver of ROI for employers that partner with Guild. This is a result that can be observed early, even before employees have completed their upskilling programs.

Meanwhile, many Guild partners have found that new hires often cite the education benefits program as a factor in their decision for applying and joining the company. As mentioned above, at The Walt Disney Company, that number is 1 in 4. At Bon Secours Mercy Health, it’s 52% of employees surveyed in the first quarter of 2022.5

Education benefits can boost brand by improving employer value propositions as well.

Finally, internal mobility is about how much and how often employees make lateral and upward moves into priority areas and roles, while removing barriers to education benefits makes it more accessible to marginalized groups — improving DEI efforts as well.

Education benefits are a proven way to nurture employee growth and engagement — and drive organizational success.

Empowering individuals to pursue their goals helps attract motivated people to your organization, stay to complete their education, and move up and around the company. Employees are more likely to feel engaged in their work and loyal to an organization that has invested in them.

As an ROI-positive program, education benefits create a win-win situation where employees thrive and organizations prosper.