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Thought Leadership

Boost Employee Engagement and Growth with Success Coaches

David Elkins

Senior Vice President, Higher Education, Kaplan

Education benefits are an essential tool for recruitment, retention, and workforce development in today’s competitive labor market—but offering these benefits alone is not enough.

Employers can help employees overcome roadblocks to taking up or completing upskilling and reskilling opportunities, such as licensure, certification, and college degree programs, by layering on success coaching. Coaching provides the clarity, structure, and encouragement many employees need to make good choices and grow professionally.

74% of workers are interested in developing new skills or pursuing additional education, while 42% of managers say they lack the resources to support such interest properly.¹

The Higher Education “Success Coach” Model

Success coaching has the potential to improve retention and graduation rates in secondary education. In an academic setting, coaches help students set clear goals to build confidence. They work together to troubleshoot barriers to success while developing self-advocacy skills. For working adult students, coaches can provide guidance on balancing the demands of school, work, and family and help students navigate complex systems to access the resources they need.

Along the way, coaches serve as accountability partners and sounding boards. They provide a safe space for students to be vulnerable in a way they would not typically be with their academic advisor or professor.

Helping employees take advantage of existing education benefits can meaningfully increase companies’ ability to retain employees — a critical factor in today’s labor market.

In many ways, the working professional seeking to advance to their next role needs help navigating to the best learning path by an expert guide who is ‘on their side,’ so to speak. Many adults who do not have a college degree have tried higher education at some point and may be afraid of failing again, especially as they face family responsibilities, competing priorities, and social and financial burdens. Fear can prevent employees from taking advantage of education benefits.

Connecting Success Coaching with Career Paths

Coaches affiliated with an employer provide clear advantages for employees. They have insight into a company’s business goals, the employee’s current job demands, and potential career growth. This perspective helps coaches in real and virtual settings provide customized guidance to help employees more effectively juggle work and supplemental education.

For example, since 2018, McDonald’s has offered success coaching for its employees and their families as part of its employee education program. The comprehensive program connects employees to programs ranging from high school equivalency certificates to MBAs through a one-on-one, custom guidance app, helping McDonald’s fill its skills gaps and address its hiring needs. Such coaching has been linked to higher levels of educational completion, employee satisfaction, and career success.

Learners who set career goals engage with learning four times more than those who don't, emphasizing the importance of career development in employee engagement.²

Building an Adaptable and Prepared Future Workforce

Employers recognize that education as a benefit—and wraparound support services like coaching—are valuable tools to help recruit and upskill employees regardless of whether those employees stay long-term with the organization. Unlike traditional education benefits tied solely to an employee’s career path at their current employer, this new generation of programs aims to help employees advance their skills and knowledge in any area.

A prime example is Amazon’s partnership with Kaplan to provide career and academic advising through Amazon’s "Career Choice" program. Since 2022, the Career Choice initiative, available to Amazon’s 590,000 frontline U.S.-based employees, has helped employees explore a variety of skills and educational paths, from English as a Second Language to Commercial Truck Driving to several hundred college and university options in various disciplines.

With so much on offer, Kaplan coaches help employees navigate the Career Choice ecosystem, often starting with a career assessment. Even if an employee seeks education rather than reskilling or upskilling, coaches use the results to align available programs, colleges, and majors with career aspirations. While the program may lead to some attrition, Amazon views it as an acceptable trade-off for attracting top-tier talent with a top-tier education offering.

Education as a benefit is an approach based on the belief that increasing education broadly across the workforce is good for society—and suitable for any business that wants to recruit and retain employees by showing that it cares about its professional advancement beyond its own four walls.

Coaching can be pivotal in helping employees attain the skills, licensure, certifications, or degrees needed to advance their careers—whether at their existing jobs or in other fields.

The result for employers? Satisfied employees who thrive at work and are well-positioned to help companies adapt to what’s next.

_{Sources:
1. 2024 Education Index, BrightHorizons
2. LinkedIn's 2024 Workplace Learning Report}