Career Development as Strategy
A Practical Guide to Creating Internal Career Centres
You’re doing more than ever for your people. So why aren’t you seeing results?
Most organizations already invest in their people.
They’ve added learning platforms, mobility programs, mentoring, leadership development, and wellness initiatives. On paper, there’s a lot happening.
And yet many leaders aren’t sure it’s making a difference.
Talent moves slowly. Career pathways are hard to see. Managers are exhausted from constant backfilling. Reskilling and role redesign are moving forward, but without a clear strategy to connect them.
The Internal Career Centre playbook was created for this moment.
It shows how internal career centres function as workforce infrastructure, helping organizations connect the career, learning, and talent efforts they already have into a system that actually works.
Career Development as Strategy: A Practical Guide to Creating Internal Career Centres
Why this playbook is needed
Across sectors, leaders are under pressure to redeploy talent, build new capabilities, and retain people while navigating constant change.
But in many organizations, career and talent development has evolved in pieces. Programs sit in different teams. Ownership is unclear. Data is fragmented. As a result, leaders struggle to answer basic questions with confidence:
- Where is talent getting stuck?
- Which investments are paying off?
- How does people growth connect to business priorities?
- What should we focus on next and what can wait?
The issue isn’t effort or intent. It’s cohesion.
When designed as infrastructure, internal career centres make career development coordinated and actionable at scale, giving leaders a clearer line of sight between workforce decisions and business outcomes.
This playbook exists to help organizations understand that shift and apply it in practice, without starting from scratch.
What the playbook does differently
Rather than treating career development as a program, perk, or engagement lever, this guide approaches it as core workforce infrastructure.
Align fragmented career, learning, and talent efforts into a coherent system
Understand how internal career centres enable mobility, capability, and adaptability
Assess readiness before investing in new initiatives or technology
Build an evidence-informed business case, including an ROI rationale
Make clearer decisions about where to focus first and why
This playbook helps organizations move from doing more to designing better. Sustainable workforce performance doesn’t come from adding programs. It comes from intentional design.
Who the playbook is for
This playbook is designed for leaders and practitioners responsible for workforce capability and long-term performance, including:
- Executives and senior leaders overseeing workforce strategy and organizational readiness
- HR and talent leaders navigating stalled mobility, retention pressure, or scaling challenges
- Learning and development professionals seeking stronger integration with business priorities
- Career development professionals partnering with employers on internal growth and mobility
- Post-secondary and workforce partners supporting employer capacity-building
The frameworks and tools are adaptable across sectors, organization sizes, and maturity levels.
Career Development as Strategy: A Practical Guide to Creating Internal Career Centres
A practical guide grounded in real workforce conditions and organizational realities.
From insight to action
Organizations use this playbook in different ways, depending on where they are in their journey.
Some use it as a standalone resource to clarify thinking, align internal conversations, and establish a shared language about career development as strategy.
Others use it as a diagnostic tool, helping leadership teams assess readiness, identify gaps, and decide where to focus without overcommitting too early.
For organizations ready to move from insight into action, the playbook can also serve as an entry point into deeper, applied work.
One option is the Internal Career Centre Bootcamp, a focused, full-day working session that helps organizations:
- Benchmark your readiness for change using the Career Development Maturity Matrix™
- Explore the ROI and business case of an internal career centre using real data
- Translate playbook insights into clearer decision-making about what comes next in your organizational context
The session combines expert facilitation with practical tools, including AI-enabled analysis, to support human-led decision-making.
Want to see what moving from insight to action can look like?
This short video explains how organizations use the Internal Career Centre Bootcamp to translate the playbook into practical next steps, at their own pace and readiness.
To learn more, contact [email protected].
Partners
This playbook was developed by Challenge Factory with the support and collaboration of national partners committed to advancing career development as a public good.
