Most career development programs in IT are mandatory. HR schedules them, managers forward the calendar invite, and people show up because they have to. Completion rates look great on a slide deck. Actual learning is another story.
I took the opposite approach. I built a program that was entirely voluntary. No attendance requirement. No manager pressure. No penalty for skipping. At peak, 37 out of 100 IT employees showed up anyway.
Here is why that matters, and what I learned about building something people actually want to be part of.
Where it started
Leadership flagged that they wanted more development investment in the team. I saw a real skills gap across the organization: strong technicians who struggled to communicate decisions upward, solid engineers who had never thought about budgets or vendor strategy, people who were good at their jobs but had no roadmap for what came next.
I have always believed that investing in people is how you build teams that last. Before IT, I spent 10 years running a karate school and earned three third-degree black belts. A decade of teaching taught me that people grow when you break complex things into learnable progressions, meet them where they are, and give them a reason to keep showing up. That philosophy carried straight into how I lead technology teams.
So when the ask came from leadership, I did not outsource it. I did not hand it to HR. I built it myself.
What we actually cover
The program runs weekly. Not monthly, not quarterly. Weekly. That cadence matters because development is not a one-time event. It is a habit.
The curriculum spans four areas:
Technical skills. Networking, scripting, troubleshooting methodology, certification prep. The foundational work that makes someone dangerous in the right way.
Leadership and soft skills. Communication, decision-making, ownership, managing up. The skills that separate someone who fixes problems from someone who prevents them.
Career growth. How to position yourself for a promotion. How to have a career conversation with your manager. How to build a professional narrative that goes beyond "I fix things."
Business acumen. Budgets, vendor management, understanding where IT fits in the P&L. If you want a seat at the leadership table, you need to speak the language of the business, not just the language of the infrastructure.
Most IT training programs stop at the first category. Technical skills are safe. They are measurable. You can put a certification logo on a slide. But the people who get promoted, who become leaders, who build careers instead of collecting paychecks, are the ones who develop across all four.
Why voluntary matters
I could have made it mandatory. It would have been easier to justify the time investment. Attendance numbers would have looked better on paper. But mandatory attendance kills the thing that makes development work: curiosity.
When someone walks into a room because they chose to be there, the energy is different. They ask questions. They challenge ideas. They do the pre-work. They come back the next week because they got something out of the last one.
When someone walks in because their manager told them to, they check their phone under the table and count the minutes.
I wanted the first kind of room. So I made it voluntary and focused on making the content good enough that people would tell their coworkers about it.
It worked. Average attendance settled around 10 to 12 people per session, which is the right size for real discussion, not a lecture. At peak we hit 37 out of about 100 IT employees. All voluntary. All on their own time.
How it grew beyond IT
The part I did not expect: it went cross-departmental.
People from operations, finance, and other business units started asking if they could attend. Word got around that this was not a typical corporate training exercise. It was practical, it was relevant, and it treated people like professionals who wanted to get better.
Then the C-suite noticed. Executives started volunteering their personal time to come speak quarterly. Not because they were asked by HR. Not because it was on their OKRs. Because they saw something real happening and wanted to be part of it.
When a Chief Officer gives up a Friday afternoon to talk to a room of IT professionals about leadership, that tells you the program has earned something no amount of mandatory attendance tracking can buy: credibility.
What changed
I am careful about claiming outcomes I cannot measure precisely. I do not have a spreadsheet that says "career development program reduced escalations by X%." I can tell you what I observed.
The team started handling more on their own. Problems that used to land on my desk were getting resolved two levels down. Not because I pushed them back, but because people had the confidence and the context to make decisions without waiting for permission.
The culture shifted. People started thinking about their careers differently. Instead of "I'm a network tech," it became "I'm building toward a leadership role and here's what I'm working on." That shift in identity changes how people show up every day.
The cross-departmental interest proved something I have always believed: when you build something genuinely valuable, you do not have to sell it. People find it on their own.
What I would tell another IT leader
Make it voluntary. The self-selection is the feature, not the bug. The people who show up are the ones who will actually change. Run it weekly, because monthly and quarterly sessions lose momentum and never build community. Go beyond technical skills, because your team does not need another networking workshop. They need to understand how the business works, how to communicate with leadership, and how to think about their career as something they are building rather than something happening to them. And teach it yourself. When the leader invests personal time, it signals that development matters. When you hand it off to a third party, it signals that it is a checkbox.
The career development program is one of the things I am most proud of building. Not because of the attendance numbers, although 37 out of 100 on a voluntary program is something. Because it proved that IT teams want to grow when you give them the opportunity and get out of the way.
The systems I build will eventually be replaced. The people I develop carry that investment with them for the rest of their careers. That is the longer-lasting infrastructure.
Adam Cooper is a Technical Director writing about distributed IT operations, maritime technology, and AI in production environments. Connect on LinkedIn or get in touch.