8 Effective Career Development Tools for Building a Thriving and Engaged Workforce

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, employees crave more than just a paycheck—they want opportunities to grow and thrive. Yet, many organizations struggle with enabling effective career development and skill-building for their talent. Without the right tools, talent potential often goes untapped, leaving organizations vulnerable to disengagement and turnover.

At Deel, we’ve seen firsthand how leveraging the right career development strategies transforms workplace culture and boosts performance. This blog dives into some of the most effective career development tools to empower a workforce, offering practical insights to help you implement them seamlessly. Key topics include AI-driven assessment platforms, mentorship networks, microlearning opportunities, and more.

By embracing these tools, your organization can unlock untapped strengths, foster a culture of continuous learning, and position itself for long-term success.

What are career development tools?

Career development tools are resources, assessments, techniques, and software that organizations can leverage to help their people understand their skills, aspirations, and potential and guide them through their career management and development plans.

Organizations and people teams can use them to create, manage, streamline, facilitate, and track employee and freelancer training strategies, programs, and processes to maximize performance, engagement, and success.

8 Career development tools compared

You can use numerous methods and tools to drive employee development, which all serve different purposes. Understanding your options will allow you to choose suitable learning instruments to address your organization’s needs and engage and motivate your workers to level up their skills.

All-in-one platforms with AI capabilities

All-in-one platforms equipped with AI capabilities bring together the resources, features, and tools of multiple career development systems into a single, cohesive solution.

Instead of incurring high costs to purchase and implement separate tools for various aspects of talent development, these platforms streamline the process, saving organizations both time and money. By leveraging AI, they can offer personalized recommendations, automated skill gap analysis, and real-time progress tracking, ensuring tailored and effective career growth for your staff.

This integrated approach eliminates the need for your team to juggle multiple programs, reducing workflow disruptions and mitigating the frustration or demotivation that often comes with switching between platforms. The result is a quick, efficient, and engaging career development experience for your workforce.

Deel Engage

Deel Engage provides a robust suite of tools to help human resource teams and leadership teams manage learning and development, career growth, and workforce engagement plans, using AI to enhance efficiency and personalization.

Key features

1. Use the survey module to gauge your people’s career interests and perform assessments
2. Use career mapping and competency frameworks to define role-specific competencies, so your workforce knows the skills needed to excel and advance within your organization
3. 360-degree feedback capabilities facilitate constructive career development conversations and create actionable development plans to bridge skill gaps
4. AI-powered learning module empowers you to create brand-new learning content with a few clicks. Additionally, you can use the AI to leverage existing PDF content. Upload your files, and the AI assistant will transform it into a fully structured learning journey, even adding quizzes, significantly reducing manual effort
5. Support for SCORM and xAPI files means you can import externally purchased or created courses to keep all learning assignments within one platform
6. Hold 1:1s via the Slack plug-in to manage one-on-one conversations, fostering better collaboration, career counseling, and feedback between team members

Pros

1. Comprehensive talent dashboards, analytics, and reporting tools provide visibility into development activities
2. Automated workflows, assignments, nudges, and reminders streamline L&D and career planning processes
3. Advanced personalization ensures coaching and recommendations are tailored to people’s needs

Cons

• Deel Engage is sold as a complete product rather than module-by-module, which may be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations with limited budgets

Personality assessment tools

Every employee has unique strengths, aspirations, reasons for doing their work, and work styles or environments that bring out their best. Often, these details are unknown so they’re not being taken full advantage of.

Personality assessment tools help uncover where each employee’s strengths, motivations, and untapped potential lie. These can help them realize and harness these talents to progress faster and become a more valuable asset to your company.

Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

MBTI provides developmental insights for individuals and teams by helping people gain a more vital awareness of what makes them tick, where they shine, and who they are. It uses responses from employees to a series of standard questions to group them into one of 16 personality types.

Pros

1. Enables organizations to provide each team member with targeted support and development opportunities based on their strengths and preferences
2. Empowers employees to take greater ownership of their role and gravitate towards career paths that serve their strengths

Cons

• Results can be oversimplified or misused to label or stereotype people

CliftonStrengths

CliftonStrengths uses a 177-question test to help companies comprehensively understand their people’s natural strengths, growth potential, and unique capabilities.

People teams can use the insights from the test to map out highly personalized career paths and development plans.

Pros

1. Assessment results come with actionable feedback and recommendations
2. You can use the CliftonStrengths test as a self-administered career tool, or you can enlist the services of its consultants to roll it out, audit your results, and provide custom solutions for your workplace

Cons

• Access to the full service or reports is a bit pricey.

Skill management platforms

Are your talent development resources being allocated efficiently? Do your employees know what skill gaps they have or what training they require to stay sharp and competitive in their respective fields?

Do you struggle with figuring out the skill competencies for everyone on your team or grooming employees for roles matching their skills and potential?

These are the problems that skill management platforms aim to solve. Their typical features include career development plans, competency assessments, skills matrices, career frameworks, and succession planning.

MuchSkills

MuchSkills gives you the tools you need to visualize and manage your organization’s skills and build an agile, engaged workforce by focusing on identifying and nurturing opportunities for talent growth and development.

Pros

1. MuchSkills is easy to deploy out of the box
2. The competency library has over 20,000 skills, so you can set up organizational charts and individual skill maps within minutes

Cons

• There’s no mobile app

TalentGuard

TalentGuard can help you make talent development a part of your company culture by crafting smart upskilling and reskilling strategies to enable employees to excel in their roles or reach the next rung on their career ladder. You can also use the tool to track progress and performance, distribute responsibilities fairly, and fill open positions quickly.

Pros

1. The tool supports the creation of tailored learning paths for individual employees
2. Offers access to thousands of learning resources for continuous professional development

Cons

• The user interface is not as organized as it should be

Online learning platforms

Think of online learning platforms as a marketplace where you can find multiple courses from subject matter experts and reputable institutions.

They make it convenient for your employees to access relevant learning content and materials that can advance their knowledge and skills whenever they want, wherever they are.

Learning tools vary in cost, course diversity, quality of presentations, depth of curriculum, content formats available, and type of qualifications or certifications they offer. The right option for your business will depend on your specific needs and learning criteria.

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning gives organizations access to 21,000+ courses across the business, marketing, technology, and creative fields taught by carefully vetted industry experts. The platform offers an interactive learning experience via short videos, quizzes, and practice exercises.

Pros

• Transcripts, closed captions, or subtitles are provided alongside videos to suit different learning styles and accessibility requirements
• LinkedIn Learning can offer data-driven course recommendations based on employee roles and interests

Cons

• Learners cannot engage with their peers or instructors within the platform

Coursera

Coursera houses over 5,800 courses from hundreds of world-renowned higher-learning institutions like Duke, Princeton, and Stanford and organizations like Google and PWC.

Coursera’s courses cater to all experience levels and cover different specializations, from UX design to digital marketing and accountancy. It also offers personal development courses, completion certificates, professional certifications, and academic degrees from accredited universities.

Pros

1. There are over 2500 free courses that your employees can benefit from
2. The platform is user-friendly, and the courses are well-structured and in-depth

Cons

• Although you can generally personalize courses according to every learner’s schedule, some programs have strict timelines.

Learning experience platforms

It will sap morale if your workers have to come to you in person, send multiple emails to request training, or jump from platform to platform every time they need to learn something.
Or if they have to wait weeks or months for you to roll out new training courses.

Consequently, they won’t be motivated to take steps to develop their skills and advance their careers.

Learning experience platforms (LXP) work to eliminate these hiccups by enabling you to design and launch training programs, assign content to users, track learner progress, and organize all your courses and materials under one roof in a fraction of the time it usually takes.

iSpring Learn

iSpring Learn is a great LMS option for organizations wanting to create blended and interactive learning experiences easily. It has a text-to-speech feature that can translate your courses into 30 languages.

iSpring also provides a content library full of pre-built templates, so you don’t have to start your course creation process from scratch.

Pros

1. Hassle-free integration with other software tools and applications
2. It provides offline access and mobile functionality, making it convenient for employees to learn on the go

Cons

• It has limited branding and customization options and doesn’t offer ready-made courses.

360Learning

360Learning’s cloud-based portal helps companies automate their entire learning and development workflows. It lets you create, manage, edit, and deliver training resources, course materials, and other content that can aid your employee’s career progression. 360Learning provides assessment tools such as exams, quizzes, and surveys to make it easy to measure your training programs’ effectiveness.

Pros

1. Detailed analytics and reports
2. Option to individualize content and learning journeys

Cons

• Limited options for contacting customer support can make it difficult to get direct assistance when needed.

Mentoring and coaching platforms

Mentoring and coaching are some of the most potent and preferred career development tools: they utilize a hands-on approach to fast-track the acquisition of specific knowledge and skills and provide employees with dedicated support and encouragement.

You can create informal coaching and mentoring structures within your organization by matching lower-level employees with senior talent who can help them develop the technical or soft skills they lack.

The time commitment required to set up and run such a program may burden some teams too much. In this case, you can always rely on external coaching and mentorship platforms to automate and facilitate the process. All of these happen via online courses.

Qooper

Qooper is a platform that helps companies match their employees with mentors and coaches who can teach them new skills, offer personalized career guidance, and prepare them to successfully tackle future challenges specific to their roles or the workplace.

Pros

1. The platform is easy to implement and has an intuitive user interface
2. Companies can take advantage of Qooper’s services right from the onboarding stage of the employee lifecycle

Cons

• There is no built-in phone or video chat functionality

CoachHub

CoachHub offers comprehensive coaching services comprised of step-by-step guidance, personalized feedback, support, and suggested exercises and strategies for all career levels, from entry to executive.

It brings lessons from a global pool of 3,500 top coaches across 90 countries, so you don’t have to worry about leaving behind any team members.

Pros

1. Extensive library of microlearning resources to keep participants engaged between coaching sessions
2. Detailed progress tracking reports and analytics

Cons

• Coaching offerings are limited to professional and workplace-related issues

Seminars, workshops, and conferences

The exposure, interactions, and networking opportunities that workshops, seminars, and conferences bring can go a long way in helping employees and contractors develop soft and hard skills. And in motivating them to explore career paths they may not have considered before.

Many people within and outside your organization are doing fantastic work and towing career paths that your employees aspire to. They have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and unique insights to share. You need to help your employees tap into it.

You can do this by organizing workplace seminars and workshops and inviting experts to come and teach specific topics to team members who can benefit from the session.

Alternatively, you can offer to sponsor employees to attend professional conferences and workshops they are interested in. Or create a fixed budget and roster for these activities and make it mandatory for employees.

Job shadowing and task rotations

The beauty of job shadowing and task rotations is that they are considerably less cost-intensive than formal career development tools. They’re easy to implement and happen in the natural flow of work, so they feel less disruptive.

Simply use tools like performance reviews, skills assessments, career mapping, and competency frameworks to determine what areas employees need or wish to improve. Then, you can find opportunities and assignments within your organization to help them develop those areas.

For example, suppose an employee desires to progress to a management role. In that case, you can have them shadow a manager to refine their leadership skills and better understand what the position entails.

By taking on tasks outside the scope of their existing role, employees can diversify their knowledge and skillset, practice concepts they’ve recently learned, and gain ample work experience in a shorter time frame.

7 Key features to look out for in career development tools

Personalized learning paths

Your employees have different learning needs, objectives, and preferences, so they will likely require different resources and activities to help them reach those goals and become proficient in their areas of interest.

Choosing an online career development tool with personalized learning paths will give individuals greater control over their learning process.

Skill gaps assessments

Performing skill gap analysis is usually the first step in employee development. Without identifying individual and organizational skill gaps, your skill and career development strategies may fail to impact overall productivity and business growth positively.

Interactive content

If you want to boost employee participation and engagement, opt for tools that offer or allow you to weave interactive content like quizzes, infographics, surveys, polls, rewards, and gamification into courses and training sessions.

Varied learning resources

The best way to nurture career development and keep employees motivated throughout the process is by utilizing tools that accommodate different learning methodologies, such as the 70-20-10 model, social learning, and peer-to-peer learning.

Feedback mechanisms

At the completion of a course or training program, you need to know what your employees think of the experience so you can make adjustments where necessary to improve learning outcomes. If the tool you choose doesn’t allow people to leave feedback, you’ll miss out on valuable insights.

Competency assessments

Ideally, a career development tool should give you the ability to assess employees’ training needs, professional strengths, and growth potential via self-evaluations, peer reviews, performance appraisals, and 1:1 check-ins.

Career pathing

Your career development tool should enable you to map out potential career progression directions—lateral, vertical, and crossfunctional—for employees based on their current skills and interests, development goals, and the talent opportunities within your organization.

What are the benefits of using career development tools in your organization?

By prioritizing talent development and adopting the right tools to aid your goal, your business can unlock the following perks.

Competence development

Career development tools can help employees stay on top of industry developments and pinpoint the skills they lack and the competencies to develop to live up to the demands of their jobs or become top experts in their areas of specialization.

Increased employee engagement and retention

Employees who feel encouraged to increase their skills and knowledge and are supported with tools and opportunities to help them grow professionally and personally will experience greater job satisfaction.

As a result, they’ll become more invested in their work and loyal to your business, so they’ll be less likely to quit.

Better alignment with future career goals

Visualizing the actions they need to take to get from where they currently are to where they want to be will make it easier for employees to optimize their learning and seek out activities that further their career plans.

It’ll also empower managers to align employee and company goals better and deliver targeted, well-timed support to help their direct reports thrive.

More opportunities for reskilling and upskilling

With career development tools, it’ll be easy to identify workers’ natural abilities and where you can put their talents to better use. As a result, you can help them refine those skills and improve their overall work performance.

Doing so, you’ll upskill employees to fill positions in your organization instead of constantly hiring from the outside.

Develop your people’s careers with Deel Engage

To stay agile and competitive, your organization must continually find innovative ways to empower people to unlock their potential and grow professionally. Deel Engage is an all-in-one platform designed to make career development, skill-building, and talent engagement easier and more efficient. It ensures your team has the tools it needs to thrive.

Schedule a demo to see how Deel Engage can support your team’s development and drive company success.