Career development is the set of actions, programs and support an organization provides to help employees build skills, gain expertise and progress toward their career goals. It is the organization’s side of a process the employee also drives from their own end.
Career development vs career planning vs career management
Who drives it
Scope
Time horizon
Career planning
The employee
Personal goals, interests and self-assessment
Short to medium term
Career development
The organization
Programs, training and opportunities offered
Ongoing
Career management
Shared, coordinated by HR
The full system connecting individual goals to organizational needs
Long term
Career planning without career development is an employee with ambition and no support. Career development without career planning is a training budget with no destination. Career management is what happens when the two are deliberately connected.
Career ladders vs career lattices
A career ladder is strictly vertical: advancement happens rung by rung within one function, and depth of specialization is the reward. A career lattice allows upward, lateral and diagonal movement across functions, which suits organizations where the next valuable move is not always up.
Most organizations run both without naming the choice. A lattice model requires internal mobility infrastructure, meaning visibility into open roles and transferable skills, that a pure ladder does not.
The 70-20-10 framework
Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership set out the 70-20-10 split in The Career Architect Development Planner (1996): roughly 70% of development comes from challenging assignments, 20% from developmental relationships such as mentoring and feedback, and 10% from formal training.
The ratios come from a self-report survey of about 200 executives describing how they believed they learned, not from controlled research. A 2018 paper by Alan Clardy, “70-20-10 and the Dominance of Informal Learning: A Fact in Search of Evidence,” argues the model has never been empirically validated as a precise formula. Used as a directional reminder that stretch assignments and relationships matter more than course catalogues, it holds up. Used as a literal allocation target, it does not.
What a career development conversation actually needs
An Individual Development Plan is the standard artefact, and it works when it has five parts:
Goals. Specific, time-bound, tied to a named next step rather than a vague direction.
Gap assessment. Current skills against what the target role or level requires.
Actions. Stretch assignments, mentoring, specific training, mapped to each gap.
Timelines. Milestones with dates, not an open-ended intention.
Manager involvement. Regular check-ins and visible support, not a document filed once a year.
Why career development matters
The retention link is one of the strongest in HR research. LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found 88% of organizations concerned about retention, with learning and career development ranked the top retention strategy.
The gap between intent and practice is wide. The same report found only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, down five points from 2024, and only 36% of organizations qualify as career development champions with mature programs.
The stakes are rising with skills change. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects 39% of workers’ core skills will change or become outdated by 2030, and found 50% of the global workforce completed employer-provided training in 2024, up from 41% in 2023.
Advancement perception matters as much as actual opportunity. Gallup’s October 2025 research found one in four US employees report lacking advancement opportunities, and employees in mentorship programs report high job satisfaction at nearly double the rate of those who are not, 48% against 29%.
How to build career development that works
Put the manager conversation on a schedule. Waiting for employees to ask is why the 15% figure is so low.
Weight the plan toward assignments, not courses. The 70-20-10 ratio may not be precise, but the direction it points is well supported by practice.
Make lateral moves visible. A lattice only functions if people can see what else exists.
Pair mentorship with formal plans. The satisfaction gap between mentored and unmentored employees is large enough to justify the investment on its own.
Review plans quarterly, not annually. Skills windows are closing faster than an annual cycle can track.
Tie development to real business need. A plan disconnected from where the organization is actually going will not survive the next budget cycle.
How Engagedly helps
Career development stalls when goals live in a document nobody revisits. Engagedly’s Learning Experience suite connects individual development plans to skills profiles and learning content, so a plan is something a manager and employee actually work from, not a form filed once.
The Talent Mobility Suite surfaces internal openings against those same skills profiles, which is what makes a lattice model practical rather than aspirational.
Career development is the programs, training and support an organization provides to help employees build skills and progress in their careers. It is the organizational counterpart to career planning, which is the employee’s own process of setting goals.
What is the 70-20-10 model of career development?
The 70-20-10 model suggests roughly 70% of development comes from challenging job assignments, 20% from mentoring and developmental relationships, and 10% from formal training. It originates from a 1996 survey of executives at the Center for Creative Leadership and should be read as a directional heuristic rather than a validated formula.
What is the difference between a career ladder and a career lattice?
A career ladder is strictly vertical progression within one function. A career lattice allows upward, lateral and diagonal moves across functions, which requires visibility into open roles and transferable skills to work in practice.
What should be in an individual development plan?
A workable plan includes specific goals, an assessment of the gap between current and needed skills, concrete actions such as stretch assignments or training, dated milestones, and regular manager involvement rather than a document reviewed once a year.
Performance
