To Each Their Own

The BEST Awards recognize organizations that demonstrate enterprise-wide success as a result of employee talent development. The winners use learning as a strategic business tool to get results. View the entire list of 2025 BEST Award winners.

Government defense and national security firm QinetiQ US experienced strategic growth through several acquisitions, bringing together diverse talent approaches and career paths. "As we integrated these organizations, our talent development team recognized the importance of creating a unified approach that would precisely target skill development across our specialized technical and defense domains," explains Timothy Horn, director of integrated talent management.

The TD team undertook a systematic approach to internal job architecture. Team members began by conducting a thorough analysis of all positions, identifying key competencies and responsibilities. They also developed a skills taxonomy that not only detailed graduated degrees of proficiency and learning requirements but also grouped similar positions into job families and charted how different roles and skills aligned to career advancement. The resulting career framework has five pathways: support, professional, technical, management, and executive.

"By mapping each role's expectations, required skills, and performance metrics, the job architecture allows employees to better understand their career development opportunities," states Horn.

The approach empowers individuals to pursue their own learning journeys, as they can choose from a variety of courses, modules, and learning experiences that support their professional goals. "The framework allows better alignment of training and development," says Horn. "We can now target levels, job families, and career paths in our offerings."

The TD team curates its learning offerings to create structured paths that build specific skill sets over time.

"We wanted employees to have the agility to make changes to their career focus. This model makes both upward and lateral moves intuitive to our workforce," Horn adds. "This design encourages employees to gain cross-functional expertise and diverse competencies, allowing them to pivot within the organization based on evolving interests or organizational needs."

Giving direction

As TD studio Cultivate expanded into new industries, it became critical for staff to quickly gain deep domain knowledge in new sectors. "Whether it's gaining expertise in a new market or mastering the latest technology, our talent development initiatives need to be aligned with real-time business needs," says Matt Kane, Cultivate's senior partner and HR, talent, and learning management consultant.

The company uses personalized career journeys comprised of unique learning pathways that support both employees' career aspirations and organizational goals such as leadership readiness, innovation capacity, and customer excellence. Many modern businesses wish to emphasize the development of future-ready skills such as digital literacy, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and agility.

The TD team curates learning content for each path, including formal courses, expert-led workshops, real-world simulations, self-paced learning, articles, and hands-on projects. Learners encounter tasks such as leading a departmental meeting or developing alternative presentation materials for a client consultation.

While many of the programs and activities follow a sequential track, Cultivate encourages workers to chart their own routes for the present and future.

"This approach not only empowers individuals to take ownership of their development but ensures that learning lines up with both personal goals and the company's strategic objectives," Kane states. "This flexibility enables our teams to quickly become proficient in unfamiliar domains."

In 2024, the strategy accelerated skill building, resulting in a 25 percent improvement in speed to competency for new skills among individual contributors. Employees' abilities factored into a larger scale of growth: Whole teams demonstrated competency in new domains 40 percent faster than the company anticipated, enabling it to take on new projects with confidence.

According to Kane, "Our personalized learning path strategy has allowed us to build a workforce that is not only highly skilled but also agile and aligned with the company's mission."

Merging curated and personal paths

GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, has a similar commitment to learning paths. The organization—which assists clients with navigating complex landscapes such as cloud computing, AI and data analytics, and cybersecurity—operates within highly competitive markets.

"We find that learning is not just a personal endeavor for employees; it's a competitive advantage," says Dharmendra Sethi, corporate vice president and head of the talent function at GlobalLogic.

Driven by a commitment to learning innovation and a personalized approach, GlobalLogic has witnessed an expansion of its training capacity, increasing training delivery from 73,000 hours in 2022 to 900,000 hours in 2024. That evolution inspired the organization to make informed decisions about its learning needs and targeted efforts to effectively close critical skills gaps.

As a result, the L&D team offers more than 50 curated learning paths, enabling the organization's global workforce to take ownership of professional growth. Staff can access the paths through GLX, a proprietary learning experience platform. Each path provides a structured learning journey that includes courses, modules, videos, and articles. Team members can pair in-house content with an extensive library of technical and soft skills programs from third-party providers such as LinkedIn Learning and Udemy.

GLX integrates with internal HR systems, enabling employees to personalize learning based on individual roles, seniority, and team dynamics. The platform proactively prompts users to share their learning goals, current skills, and expertise level. An AI agent in the tool then recommends a learning journey with a progressive pathway through courses, assets, and activities to help individuals achieve specific goals. Teams can collaborate by consuming the same content.

The platform also enables users to validate skills via built-in assessments and earn certificates upon completing learning paths. The AI engine generates accompanying quizzes and coding challenges.

"Personalized paths ensure that learning is not one-size-fits-all," says Sethi. "They empower learners with the flexibility to choose what, where, and how they learn, while enabling managers and the L&D team to cultivate specific learning behaviors, skill development, and career growth."

View the entire list of 2025 BEST Award winners.