Amanda Myton spent her career inside hypergrowth companies, watching how fast the work changes and how quickly people outgrow their job descriptions. As Director of Employee Development at Anaplan, she has built training, enablement, and people programs that try to keep up with that pace. Her view is that career development cannot be a once-a-year conversation between a manager and a direct report, because by the time the next review comes around, the role has already shifted.
On Reimagining Company Culture, Amanda made the case for treating career development as an everyday operating practice instead of a benefit reserved for high performers. That mindset shift, from event to habit, is what most People teams still struggle to make stick. This piece pulls together what Amanda described and what HR leaders can do about it.
Why Career Development Stalls Inside Fast-Growing Companies
In hypergrowth, hiring outpaces internal investment. New roles get posted externally because they are needed yesterday, and the people already inside the company watch their development conversations get rescheduled. Over time, that pattern teaches employees that the fastest way to grow is to leave. According to SHRM research on internal mobility, employees who move into new roles within their company stay nearly twice as long as those who do not, yet only about a third of employers report having a strong internal mobility program.
Amanda named the same gap from inside Anaplan. Engineers, customer success leads, and enablement specialists all want a sense of where they are going next, and most managers are too busy shipping to map it out. The fix is not a glossier competency model. It is a cadence: shorter, more frequent conversations that are documented, owned by the employee, and reviewed by someone other than the direct manager.
Reframing Career Development as a Two-Way Contract
The episode kept returning to a simple idea. Career paths are co-authored, not assigned. The company brings the openings, the budget, and the visibility. The employee brings curiosity, candor about what they want, and a willingness to stretch into roles that do not match their current title. When either side stops carrying their half, development collapses into either entitlement or neglect.
What does a healthy development conversation actually cover?
Amanda described three layers. The first is the work itself, what the person is doing right now and how it is going. The second is capability, what skills or experiences they need to be ready for the next move. The third is direction, where they want to head over the next two to three years, even if that destination is fuzzy. Skipping any layer turns the conversation into either a status update or a wish list.
How often should these conversations happen?
Quarterly at minimum, with shorter check-ins between. Annual reviews are too late to catch a person who is already mentally out the door. Quarterly cadences also force managers to keep notes, which feeds into succession planning and avoids the panic of trying to backfill a senior role with no internal candidate ready.
What Actually Works Inside Hypergrowth Companies
Amanda was clear that career development programs fail when they get over-engineered. The companies that get this right tend to share a few habits.
Make internal moves feel safer than external ones
If applying for an internal role requires telling your current manager first, you have built a system that punishes ambition. Healthy programs let people explore quietly, talk to hiring managers, and only loop in their current leader once there is a real opportunity. Deloitte's research on internal mobility found that opacity in the application process is one of the biggest reasons employees default to looking outside.
Treat upskilling as a manager responsibility, not a perk
Tuition reimbursement and learning stipends are fine, but they put the entire load on the employee to figure out what to learn. The companies Amanda has seen succeed bake skill-building into the work, pairing people with stretch projects, rotational assignments, and mentoring relationships that connect to real business outcomes. Investing in upskilling as part of the operating rhythm pays back in retention.
Document the path, then publish it
Hidden career frameworks help no one. When job levels, expected behaviors, and pay bands are visible, employees can self-assess and have grounded conversations. Training and development should not be a side channel of HR knowledge; it should be a document an engineer can read at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Where Employee Relations Fits in Career Development
Career conversations sound like a learning function topic, but they live or die based on trust. If employees do not feel safe raising concerns about a manager, a peer, or a stalled promotion, no amount of frameworks will move the needle. That is where employee relations infrastructure becomes part of the development story. AllVoices supports this with an employee engagement solution that surfaces the early signals of disengagement, and with pulse surveys that let People teams see where development conversations are happening and where they are quietly being skipped.
How ER data informs career programs
Patterns in feedback often show up before turnover does. A spike in concerns from one team about lack of growth, or a cluster of comments about favoritism in promotions, points directly at where development is breaking down. Pairing that data with structured one-on-one cadences gives People leaders a real-time read on whether their career programs are reaching the people who need them, instead of finding out at the exit interview.
Frequently Asked Questions About Career Development
What is the biggest mistake companies make with career development?
Treating it as a benefit instead of an operating practice. When development only happens during review season, it becomes performative. Embedding it into weekly one-on-ones, project staffing decisions, and team planning is what makes it stick.
How do you build a career path for roles that did not exist last year?
You build the framework around capabilities, not job titles. If a role evolves, the underlying skills and experiences still map to growth. Anaplan and similar hypergrowth companies tend to define career levels around scope, complexity, and influence rather than rigid job descriptions.
Should every employee have a formal development plan?
Yes, but the formality should match the employee. A new graduate may need a detailed plan with quarterly milestones. A senior leader may need a one-page document focused on a single stretch goal. The point is that no one should be invisible.
How do you handle employees who do not want to be promoted?
Career growth is not synonymous with management. Many strong individual contributors prefer to deepen expertise rather than lead teams. Programs that recognize technical or specialist tracks alongside management ladders give those employees a real future without forcing them into roles they do not want.
How can HR measure whether career development is actually working?
Internal hire rate, time in role before promotion, regretted attrition, and employee engagement scores tied to growth questions all help. Combining quantitative measures with qualitative feedback from pulse surveys gives a fuller picture than any single metric can.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Amanda Myton's central argument is that career development is not a program; it is a posture. Companies that treat it as a posture, woven into how managers run their teams and how People teams measure success, end up with stronger retention, deeper benches, and more honest conversations. Companies that treat it as a program build slide decks that nobody opens.
For HR leaders inside fast-moving organizations, the practical next step is to audit how often real development conversations happen, who is having them, and what gets documented. The gap between what the org chart says and what employees actually experience is where the work lives. Closing that gap takes consistent cadence, transparent frameworks, and a feedback loop that lets People teams hear the truth before it shows up in resignation letters.
Internal mobility, growth, and engagement also depend on a workplace where people feel safe speaking up. If your team is rebuilding its development practice and wants to see how integrated employee feedback fits into that work, request a demo of AllVoices to see how People teams use feedback data to strengthen retention.
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