Three Ways Smart Companies Promote Workforce Skills Development

While headlines warn of AI replacing workers – including college grads who are facing one of the toughest entry-level job markets in years – employers in this fast-changing job market are struggling to ensure they make the right hires for future resilience and growth. The smartest companies are turning today’s uncertainty into a competitive advantage: rather than compete for scarce “AI-ready” talent, they’re creating it from within through employer-paid education benefits.  

Using education benefits to future-proof careers covers much more than AI, of course. LinkedIn’s 2025 Skills on the Rise list includes skills like adaptability and innovative thinking in its top five ranking – exactly the kinds of skills that complement rather than compete with AI. When companies invest in developing these competencies alongside technical literacy, they’re building resilient teams capable of thriving alongside technological change. That’s particularly appealing to Gen Z, who expect continuous learning to be part of their careers and rank tuition reimbursement and role-specific skills classes as valuable learning and development benefits.

Yet despite an alignment of employer needs, employee expectations and market realities, there’s a significant disconnect between the transformative potential of these programs and the reality of how much they’re actually used. In today’s market, the immediate task for HR professionals is both ensuring a relevant portfolio of education benefits and also helping more employees take advantage of them. In the process, they can show other company leaders how much worker engagement and retention can be improved by taking fairly simple steps to make these benefits more accessible.

The strong ROI of education benefits programs should be no surprise if we consider consistent survey results showing their popularity among employees and the loyalty they inspire. An ADP Research survey of nearly 38,000 global employees found that workers who strongly feel their employer is providing the training they need are nearly six times more likely than others to recommend their company as a great place to work. They are also 3.3 times more likely to describe themselves as “highly productive.”

Unfortunately, these benefits are severely underutilized. Ninety-two percent of employers offer some form of educational benefit, but only 2 percent of eligible employees use those benefits. Even more telling: 60 percent of working professionals are unaware of the education benefits available to them. In other words, despite a healthy $5250 federal tax incentive and strong employee interest, for most employees tuition assistance is something like an underperforming asset in an investment portfolio. Too often, education benefits are both poorly publicized and bureaucratically cumbersome to use. It’s the corporate equivalent of having premium software licenses sitting unused while teams struggle with outdated tools. As a result, employee satisfaction, growth, and retention suffers, which means employers have a harder time meeting their goals.

Leading organizations are rewriting their playbook with approaches that treat education benefits as core infrastructure rather than nice-to-have perks, which can be game changing for individual workers and their employers. In Kaplan’s work with partners ranging from Amazon’s Career Choice program to HelloFresh and Roper St Francis Healthcare in South Carolina, we’ve found that employers get great uptake and results with these three strategies:

1. Make education benefits easy to use. Top-performing programs ensure every employee knows they’re eligible for tuition assistance along with more familiar health and retirement benefits. This means all the details are in one place, including dollar amounts and streamlined sign-up procedures, so employees have a one-stop resource for building their skills and pursuing their dreams.

2. Connect learning to personal career mobility. HR managers should frame tuition help as one more way to enrich the overall employee experience, linking specific educational opportunities to concrete advancement paths. They can use nudges like emails during back-to-school season to encourage workers to see skills-building as a career advancement solution. They should underscore that the company is investing in its employees because it cares about their well-being and wants to meet their needs.

3. Seek win-win deals with partner colleges and universities. Working adults are price-sensitive when pursuing additional education and training. That makes fully-funded tuition particularly appealing. With this in mind, forging partnerships with education providers can be mutually beneficial: colleges may be willing to reduce tuition for many classes and programs to ensure a steady stream of enrollment by motivating working adults.

At Roper St Francis, streamlining the ease of using education benefits has significantly improved employee retention. In an industry facing major labor expenses - including the cost of replacing workers who leave because they see no path forward - covering tuition expenses tells health care workers that their employer cares about their career advancement.

Meal-kit company HelloFresh has seen great results from making education benefits simple to use for its hourly frontline employees. Many workers assembling the company’s meal kits work long hours on a production line, often in refrigerated rooms. They frequently have limited education, meaning they need to build foundational skills to get ahead. That makes earning a high school diploma through the GED equivalency exam very appealing. Through HelloFresh’s partnership with Kaplan, they can take prep courses with zero out-of-pocket costs. The company works hard to get employees’ attention with messages that stress the link between education and upward mobility, reaching out through email and flyers.

In a very different sector, MANTECH, a U.S. government contractor that provides technology solutions and services, recognizes that its ability to meet the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals is critical to its continued success. It partnered with Purdue University Global to develop a customized online training program to prepare MANTECH employees for the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) credential. They could build these key skills while remaining engaged with their positions and responsibilities at work.

As workforce demands continue evolving at an unprecedented pace, education benefits represent more than employee satisfaction initiatives – they’re infrastructure investments in organizational resilience. From AI to health-care skills, the specific details of every company’s emerging needs will naturally vary. But as long as workers seek opportunity and employers aim to hire and retain the right talent, wise leaders will extract the maximum value from the education benefits they offer. Human resource managers in particular should strive to be forward-thinking strategic architects. By driving employee engagement, retention, and purpose, education benefits can position companies for resilience in uncertain times.