How HR can build an employee career upskilling program

The career growth gap in Indian workplaces

Here is the uncomfortable question most HR teams never ask directly: does your company have a plan for every employee's role, while most of those employees have no plan for their own career?

That asymmetry is the root of the career growth crisis in Indian workplaces. Organizations invest significantly in workforce planning, succession frameworks, and performance management systems. Meanwhile, the average employee shows up, delivers their assigned work, waits for a review, and hopes the increment reflects their contribution. Career development happens to them rather than by them.

The India Skills Report 2025, published by Wheebox ETS in collaboration with AICTE, CII, and AIU and based on data from over 6.5 lakh candidates and 1,000 corporations across 15 industries, found that India's overall graduate employability rate has risen to 54.81% in 2025, up from 33% a decade ago. That improvement is real. But it also means that nearly half of India's graduate workforce is still not meeting industry readiness standards, and within organizations, the ongoing career development of already-employed talent is receiving even less structured attention than pre-employment training.

According to the Ministry of Finance's Economic Survey 2024-25, India needs to create 7.85 million non-agriculture sector jobs every year until 2030 to sustain its current economic growth trajectory. In that environment, organizations that fail to develop and retain the talent they already have face a compounding disadvantage. The consequence of the career growth gap is not just individual frustration. It is organizational attrition, team disengagement, and the gradual erosion of internal talent pipelines that took years to build.

Why career ownership matters for organizations

When employees do not own their career growth, costs accumulate quietly across three dimensions that HR leaders should be tracking.

• Retention: Limited career growth is one of the top attrition drivers across Indian organizations, alongside inadequate compensation and poor management, according to Aon's Annual Salary Increase and Turnover Survey 2024-25. Employees who cannot see a clear path forward inside the organization begin mapping one outside it, often without saying a word until they hand in their notice. By that point, the development investment the organization made in that person is already walking out the door.
• Engagement: The connection between career clarity and daily engagement is direct. An employee who knows what they are building toward, which skills they are developing, and how their current role connects to their next one, is not just more productive in the short term. They are more resilient under pressure, more collaborative across teams, and significantly less likely to be recruited away by a marginally higher offer.
• Internal mobility: Organizations that fill roles from within spend less on external recruitment, onboard faster, retain institutional knowledge, and signal to the broader workforce that growth is genuinely possible without leaving. But internal mobility does not happen organically. It requires HR to actively build the visibility and skill infrastructure that makes cross-functional movement possible and trusted.

As Bhavani Runa, career growth coach and former VP with over 22 years in the travel and hospitality industry, put it during Pazcare's HealthCon 2.0 session: your company has a plan for your role. Do you have a plan for your career? That question, asked plainly to an employee in a structured check-in, changes the nature of the conversation entirely.

The problem: employees are stuck in reactive mode

During the HealthCon 2.0 session, Bhavani ran a quick pulse check with participants. She asked two groups to identify themselves: those who had planned their career deliberately, and those who had simply landed where they are. The response in the chat was unambiguous. The large majority typed just landed.

This is not a failure of individual ambition. It is the predictable result of how most Indians are culturally conditioned to approach employment. Finish your degree, find a job, go with the flow. As Bhavani observed: most of us are accustomed, from childhood, to being told to finish your graduation, find a job, and then you are on your own. The career part is assumed to take care of itself.

In practice, most employees wait reactively for three things: a promotion to signal that growth is happening, manager feedback to tell them what to work on, and a company-organized training program to deliver the skills they need. When none of these arrive on time, or arrive without context or follow-through, the employee begins evaluating employers who appear more invested in their future.

The shift that HR teams must make is from administering what happens to employees to becoming the architects of what employees can intentionally choose to become. That is not about running more training programs. It is about shifting people from reactive to intentional, a shift that Bhavani described as the central theme of the session, and which is also the central argument for why a structured employee career upskilling program is the most underutilized retention lever in most Indian organizations today.

Introducing the career audit framework for HR programs

One of the most practically useful tools from the session is a four-question career audit that any HR team can institutionalize. Bhavani uses this framework with the mid-level professionals she coaches individually. It scales to organizational programs when embedded into quarterly check-ins, self-assessment tools, or performance review cycles. The four questions are as follows.

• Am I growing? Have I learned something genuinely new in the last 90 days, specifically something that advances my capability rather than simply completing a task I already know how to do? If the answer is yes, the employee scores on-track. If not, the question becomes what structural conditions are missing that are preventing growth.
• Am I visible? Does my manager's manager know my name and specifically what I am good at? Not my role title, but my demonstrable contribution and capability. Bhavani was unambiguous on this: if they know your name but not what you bring to the table, the answer is no. Visibility is not about being loud or self-promotional. It is about being known for something specific and valuable.
• Am I marketable? If this employee applied for a job today, would their skills be competitive at current market standards? This is a question most HR teams are reluctant to raise with employees, but it is the most honest signal of whether internal development is keeping pace with external demand. An employee whose skills are becoming uncompetitive externally is already at risk, whether or not they know it.
• Am I intentional? Can the employee name the specific role they want in two years? Not a vague direction, but an actual destination. Bhavani offered her own answer during the session as a model: I want to be among the top 50 career growth coaches in India. That specificity is what makes planning possible. Without it, development conversations remain abstract and plans remain unwritten.

How HR teams can use this framework

Build the four questions into your quarterly check-in template so that career conversations happen at a structured cadence rather than only at annual review time. Run them as a self-assessment before performance reviews so managers meet informed employees rather than surprised ones. Track score distribution across the team: if more than half of your employees cannot answer, am I intentional with any specificity, the career development infrastructure is not working, and the attrition data will eventually reflect that.

The scoring guide is simple. Four yes answers means the employee is on track. Two to three means a structured plan is needed. Zero to one means the employee requires immediate, supported intervention. HR teams who surface this data proactively address disengagement before it becomes attrition.

Understanding employee career zones

Bhavani described three zones that capture where most professionals sit at any given point in their working life. HR teams that can identify which zone each employee occupies can design targeted interventions rather than delivering blanket training programs that address no one's actual need.

• The stagnation zone describes employees who have been performing the same work for years with no meaningful change in either skill or responsibility. Skills become outdated, motivation trends toward zero, and replacement risk quietly rises as the organization's needs evolve around them. The example Bhavani gave was specific: a person seen handling the same counter work in a bank branch for 16 years. That is not reliable. That is stagnation, and it serves neither the employee nor the organization.
• The comfort zone is where the majority of professionals sit at any point in their career. Competent, reliable, and invisible to senior leadership. Good at their job, not actively learning anything new, not building personal visibility, not making intentional moves. Bhavani's threshold was clear: if you have spent more than four years in the same department doing the same work without a deliberate growth move, you are in the comfort zone. The danger of the comfort zone is not that the employee is underperforming. It is that they are performing adequately while their skills and market value quietly depreciate, right up until the moment they or the organization recognizes the gap has become irreversible.
• The growth zone is where roughly 20% of any organization's people sit at a given time. Among that 20%, Bhavani estimated, only 1% reach the top levels. These employees are consistently learning, taking on work that is slightly beyond their current comfort level, expanding their visibility with senior leadership, and building a personal reputation for something specific and valuable. They are promotable not just because they perform but because people across the organization know exactly what they bring.

HR's action based on zone identification

The goal is not to shame employees out of their comfort zone through performance management. It is to show them the real cost of staying there, and to build the structural conditions that make moving into the growth zone achievable and supported. Stagnation-zone employees need honest, specific conversations and guided development plans. Comfort-zone employees need visibility coaching, stretch assignments, and a clear articulation of what the next level requires. Growth-zone employees need accelerated opportunities, senior sponsorship, and retention-focused conversations before a competitor provides them.

Rethinking career growth beyond promotions

One of the most consistent and limiting traps in Indian HR practice is equating career growth exclusively with vertical movement: a promotion to the next title level, a larger team, a higher salary band. When vertical movement is the only recognized form of growth, employees who cannot move up feel they are not growing at all, even when they are building skills, expanding their knowledge, and becoming more valuable to the organization every month.

Bhavani's own career is the counterexample worth citing. She started as a receptionist and grew vertically for the first phase of her career. Then she made a deliberate choice to grow horizontally, moving from sales to operations to marketing to customer centricity to business development. That horizontal expansion gave her what vertical movement alone would not have: a 360-degree understanding of every function in the organization, the ability to identify and solve problems across departments because she had been inside each of them, and the pan-India and APAC-level scope that followed. She reached VP level handling a team of 286 people not despite her horizontal moves but because of them.

The three types of career growth that HR teams need to understand and actively enable are vertical, horizontal, and deep.

• Vertical growth is movement up the hierarchy: higher designation, broader scope, larger team, increased compensation. This is the type most employees default to as the definition of success, and it is the type most organizations only reward.
• Horizontal growth is movement across functions at a comparable level. New domains, new problems, new relationships. For employees who want variety, a career pivot, or a genuinely rounded understanding of the business, horizontal moves are frequently more valuable than waiting for a vertical opening that may not come for years.
• Deep growth is going substantially deeper in a specific domain rather than broader. Bhavani's example was finance professionals who became GST specialists when the regulation changed in 2017, building expertise so comprehensive that they became indispensable resources across their organizations and across the market.

HR strategy for enabling all three

Build internal mobility programs that make horizontal moves structurally possible and culturally respected, not treated as a failure to get promoted. Create structured job rotation programs for high-potential employees. Design skill-based career paths that make deep growth visible and valued alongside vertical advancement. Most importantly, communicate these pathways explicitly during onboarding, career conversations, and development check-ins. Employees who are never told that horizontal or deep moves are valued will continue to look only for vertical ones, and leave when those do not arrive on their expected timeline.

Building a skill-first culture

• The skill gap framework Bhavani introduced in the session is deceptively simple, and HR teams can implement it at scale with minimal tooling. It asks employees to do three things in writing: document the skills they demonstrably have today, identify the skills the role they want next requires, and name the gap between the two.
• The instruction she gave was deliberately specific: be specific, not vague. You cannot say I am good at work. What are you specifically good at? Attention to detail, persuasion, active listening, data analysis, stakeholder management? The standard is that you should be able to demonstrate the skill, not just claim it. Generic self-assessments produce generic development plans that no one follows.
• The gap column is what becomes the personalized development plan. But Bhavani made a point that HR teams should internalize before rolling this out at scale: employees do not need to close every gap identified. For the next six to twelve months, they should focus on two or three skills at the intersection of what their target role genuinely requires and what the market currently values. More than that becomes cognitively and practically overwhelming, and the result is that nothing actually gets developed.

HR implementation of the skill gap framework

Introduce structured skill mapping tools that make this exercise repeatable, not a one-time workshop output that lives in a folder and is never revisited. Build role-based competency frameworks that define what the next career level requires before employees reach it, so they can begin building the relevant skills now rather than discovering the requirements at promotion time. Create personalized learning paths that connect specific skill gaps to specific development activities, internal stretch projects, mentors, courses, and on-the-job assignments, rather than offering a generic training catalog and hoping employees self-select appropriately.

According to research on reskilling and upskilling in Indian organizations published in Advances in Consumer Research in October 2025, HR professionals play a central role in bridging the skills divide by aligning learning strategies with business objectives and fostering a continuous learning culture. However, organizations that lack structured frameworks for identifying and closing skill gaps consistently underinvest in the areas that matter most and overinvest in the areas that are easiest to measure. 

Focusing on the right skills in 2026

Not all skills are equal, and one of the most useful things an HR team can communicate to employees through a structured upskilling program is which skills have durable market value versus which ones are short-lived or already being automated out of relevance.

Bhavani organized skills into three categories that map onto three distinct career stages, and each category demands a different development approach.

• Meta skills are the trending, demand-driven capabilities that the current market urgently values and that most employees are not developing fast enough. In 2026, this means genuine proficiency with AI tools: not using ChatGPT the way most people use Google, as Bhavani put it directly in the session, but understanding how to use it strategically to extract real productivity gains specific to your role. It means data fluency, specifically working with tools like Power BI or advanced Excel beyond the basics. It means adapting quickly when the environment or the tools change. Meta skills are the differentiator between employees who stay relevant and those who do not.
• Soft skills are the behavioral and interpersonal capabilities that matter across every career stage but become increasingly critical as employees move toward leadership. Communication, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, the ability to influence without authority, assertive communication, and stakeholder management belong here. These are the skills that separate technical contributors from people who can actually lead organizations through complexity.
• Hard skills are role-specific technical competencies: certifications, domain expertise, tools, and technical languages relevant to the function. At early career stages these are the primary development focus. At senior levels they remain necessary as credibility anchors but are no longer sufficient to drive advancement on their own.

The career stage framework for HR programs

Early career employees with zero to three years of experience should concentrate primarily on hard skills while simultaneously building communication and interpersonal foundations. Mid-career employees with four or more years of experience should be actively investing in soft skills, because these are what determine whether they are ready for leadership. Senior professionals with ten or more years need meta skills as their primary differentiator, because strategic thinking, decision quality under ambiguity, and effective people management at scale are what separate senior contributors from organizational leaders.

HR's action: move beyond generic training programs that deliver the same communication workshop to a first-year analyst and a team manager simultaneously. Targeted, role-appropriate, career-stage-calibrated upskilling is what actually moves people, and what employees notice as meaningful investment rather than compliance activity.

Redesigning learning with the 70-20-10 model

The most important reframe in the HealthCon 2.0 session was about where learning actually comes from, and the degree to which most organizations are investing in the least effective source.

• The 70-20-10 model was developed from research conducted by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger at the Center for Creative Leadership in the late 1980s, based on a study of 191 successful executives asked where they believed they had learned the skills that led to their effectiveness. The findings by WHO: 70% from challenging on-the-job assignments, 20% from learning from others including feedback, mentoring, and observation, and 10% from coursework and formal learning programs. 
• Research by Charles Jennings and Towards Maturity found that 90% of employees consider collaboration essential or very useful to performing their work, while only 37% say the same about formal learning. Yet in the average Indian organization, the L&D budget is heavily weighted toward formal learning: external workshops, certifications, eLearning subscriptions, and conference attendance. The 10% of learning that produces the least durable behavior change receives the most investment.
• Bhavani was explicit about this in the session: most people spend 90% of their time on formal learning. It should be 10%. The most effective source of career development, on-the-job stretch, costs almost nothing to enable. It requires managers who are willing to assign employees to problems slightly beyond their current capability, and a culture that treats the resulting mistakes as learning events rather than performance failures.

HR's opportunity under the 70-20-10 model

• Build formal stretch assignment programs so that the 70% of learning that happens on the job is structured and deliberate rather than accidental and unevenly distributed across teams with different managers. Make it organizationally legitimate for employees to raise their hand for cross-functional projects without requiring exclusive approval from their direct manager.
• Build mentorship programs that pair mid-career employees with senior professionals outside their direct reporting line. The most valuable mentors, as Bhavani described from her own career, offer both objective feedback and honest challenges that a direct manager may moderate. A mentor who tells you that you were not right to do this and here is why is more valuable than a manager who softens the feedback to preserve the relationship.
• Reduce over-reliance on external workshops and certifications as the primary evidence of employee development. An employee who has attended eight courses and cannot demonstrate a single behavioral change has not developed. An employee who took on a complex operational problem outside their normal role and solved it has, regardless of the certificate they hold. As Bhavani put it from her own experience: I was not waiting for anyone to send me to workshops. Whatever I learned in training I would come back and apply. That gave me success.

Solving the visibility problem

Here is a finding from the session that every HR leader should internalize and act on: performance alone accounts for only 10% of career advancement decisions. The rest is visibility, relationships, and perception.

Good work, done quietly, advances careers slowly. That is not cynical; it is structural. Decision-makers at every organizational level are managing more than they can observe. They promote who they remember, who has been visible to them in contexts that matter, and who has built a credible personal reputation within the organization. Bhavani's analogy was precise. When someone says denim, a specific brand comes to mind immediately. Not because it is objectively the best denim available, but because it has built recall. The question for every employee and every HR team supporting them is: when senior leadership discusses who is ready for the next role, whose name comes to mind?

The majority of high performers in Indian organizations are not building this visibility deliberately. They are waiting for their annual review to share their achievements. They are confusing being busy with delivering impact. They are attending every meeting but not making the contributions that create memorable recall at the leadership level.

HR interventions for the visibility problem

Encourage and structure weekly updates that capture wins, learnings, and contributions at the individual level and make them visible to the broader team and to senior stakeholders. Create platforms, formal and informal, where employees share what they have learned. A 10-minute knowledge share after attending an external course costs nothing and builds both the sharer's visibility and the team's collective capability.

Recognize contributions publicly, specifically, and in real time rather than reserving acknowledgment for annual award cycles that arrive months after the contribution was made. Prompt manager conversations about growth goals explicitly, not just performance ratings, and make it structurally safe for employees who are not naturally self-promoting to build visibility in structured ways that do not require them to feel like they are blowing their own trumpet.

The 90-day career growth framework for employees

The practical output of the HealthCon 2.0 session was a three-month framework that HR teams can roll out as a structured organizational program. Its strength is that it is sequential: each month builds on the previous one rather than asking employees to address everything simultaneously.

Month one: clarity

The first 30 days are about honest self-assessment. Employees complete the four-question career audit, identify their current zone, stagnation, comfort, or growth, and run the skill gap framework to identify their top three development priorities. The output of month one is a written document, not a mental note, naming the specific role they want in two years and the three skills they need to build to get there.

Bhavani was emphatic on writing: think it and ink it. When you write it, it becomes more authentic. You are able to connect, remember, and relate to things better. Writing is not a soft preference for some personality types. For the specific cognitive work of career planning, it is the difference between an intention and a commitment that actually gets acted on.

HR's role in month one is providing the structure: the audit questions, the skill gap template, and a scheduled conversation with a manager or HR business partner to review what the employee has produced and discuss what organizational support is available.

Month two: action

The second 30 days are about execution against the clarity produced in month one. Employees identify their 70% stretch project, meaning a piece of work slightly above their current level that they can volunteer for now, inside or outside their normal function. They identify the mentor or peer from whom they will learn in the 20% category, and they begin the one course or certification that constitutes their structured 10%.

The critical sequencing point: start the stretch project before beginning the formal course. The experiential learning creates context that makes the formal instruction land more effectively. An employee who has spent two months struggling with stakeholder alignment will extract dramatically more value from a stakeholder management course than one who attends the same course without that lived experience as context.

Month three: visibility

The third 30 days are about making the growth visible to the organization. Employees share one meaningful thing they have learned with their team. They send a structured update of their progress and wins to their manager. They have an explicit career conversation, distinct from a performance conversation, with their manager or HR business partner about where they are headed, what they are building, and what support the organization can provide.

The 90-day cycle does not end at month three. It repeats, quarterly, building the habit of intentional career management as a regular organizational practice rather than a once-a-year event that produces goals no one revisits until the following review.

What HR leaders should do next

The shift from HR as administrator to HR as career enabler does not require organizational restructuring. It requires five concrete changes to how HR teams currently operate, each of which is achievable with existing resources and a structured implementation approach.

• Introduce career audits as a standard tool: The four questions, am I growing, am I visible, am I marketable, am I intentional, should be embedded in every quarterly check-in, not reserved for annual performance reviews. HR teams that collect this data consistently can identify disengagement patterns before they become attrition events.
• Build skill frameworks before employees need them: Role-based competency frameworks that define what the next career level requires should exist and be communicated before an employee reaches that level. When employees can see the specific skills the role they want demands, they can begin building them now. When they cannot see those requirements, they guess, plateau, or leave.
• Enable internal mobility deliberately and structurally: Internal mobility does not happen without HR creating the conditions for it. That means posting open roles internally before going to external recruitment, building structured processes for horizontal moves that do not penalize the employee's growth trajectory, and training managers to actively support employees who express interest in other functions rather than treating that interest as a retention threat.
• Track growth, not just performance: Performance management systems measure what employees have delivered. Career development tracking measures what employees are actively building. Both are necessary and neither substitutes for the other. Organizations that only track the former produce well-evaluated employees who leave anyway because no one was monitoring whether their skills were growing or stagnating.
• Encourage and enable ownership at the employee level: The most durable career programs are the ones employees feel genuine ownership over. HR's job is to build the structure: the audit tools, the skill frameworks, the stretch project programs, the mentorship infrastructure, and the visibility platforms. The employee's job is to use them with intention. Stop waiting for the company to send you for a training program, as Bhavani put it in the session. Seventy percent of what you need to learn is available to you on the job right now.

Organizations that offer structured upskilling programs retain employees 63% longer, according to Aon's survey of 1,060 companies across 45 industries in India. For a 200-person SME where the cost of a single mid-level exit runs to 50% to 100% of annual salary, a meaningful improvement in retention driven by structured career development investment pays back the program cost many times over in the first year alone.

The formal education that got your employees into their seats will not keep them growing once they are there. As Jim Rohn observed, and Bhavani quoted in the session: formal education can get you a living. Self-education can get you a fortune. HR's job in 2026 is to make structured, intentional, self-directed career development available to every employee in the organization, not just the ones ambitious enough to figure it out on their own.

Watch the full session with Bhavani Runa on Pazcare's YouTube channel

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