10 companies with the best employee training programs (and what you can learn from them)

Some companies treat training as a cost they have to justify every year. Others treat it as part of their strategy. The difference isn't always the budget. It comes down to specific decisions: what gets taught, who teaches it, how it connects to daily work and what it's expected to achieve.

The ten companies below run training programs that are cited again and again as benchmarks. Not every idea can be copied as it is, since few companies are the size of Amazon or McDonald's, but each one offers a lesson that can be applied anywhere.

1. McDonald's: the original corporate university

McDonald's opened Hamburger University in 1961, in the basement of a restaurant in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It has since become one of the best-known examples of a corporate university, training restaurant managers and leaders around the world in operations, leadership and customer service.

What you can learn: training works best when it's part of a career path rather than a one-off event. Every step up in responsibility comes with its own program.

2. Amazon: reskilling at scale

In 2019, Amazon announced Upskilling 2025, a $700 million commitment to retrain 100,000 employees for more technical roles. It includes programs such as Career Choice, which helps pay for studies in high-demand fields, even outside the company.

What you can learn: anticipate which jobs are going to disappear or change and train people before it happens. Retraining someone who already knows the company is usually cheaper than hiring from outside.

3. PwC: a skills plan for the whole firm

Also in 2019, PwC launched its New world. New skills. program, with an announced investment of $3 billion over four years to improve the digital skills of its people and of its clients and communities.

What you can learn: when a skill is strategic, as digital skills are, optional courses aren't enough. It has to become a company-wide objective, with its own budget and follow-up.

4. Google: employees teaching employees

Google's g2g (Googler-to-Googler) program rests on a simple idea: much of the company's internal training is delivered by employees themselves, on a voluntary basis, on topics ranging from technical skills to communication and leadership.

What you can learn: a company's most valuable knowledge is often already inside it. Turning your best people into trainers strengthens that knowledge and recognizes those who share it. It is the idea behind the zone of proximal development: people learn faster with guidance from someone a little more experienced.

5. Deloitte: a campus for learning together

Deloitte University opened in 2011 in Westlake, Texas, as a learning and leadership development center for its professionals. Investing in a physical campus in the age of e-learning reflected a clear idea: part of learning happens by spending time with colleagues from other offices and countries.

What you can learn: training also builds networks and culture. Even without a campus, bringing people from different teams into the same program multiplies its value.

6. AT&T: rebuilding the workforce from within

Facing rapid technological change in telecoms, AT&T launched its Future Ready initiative in the early 2010s to retrain a large part of its workforce. One of its key pieces was a partnership with Georgia Tech and Udacity to launch an online master's degree in computer science in 2014, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional one.

What you can learn: partnering with educational institutions lets you offer high-level training without building it from scratch.

7. Walmart: training for frontline staff

In 2016, Walmart launched Walmart Academy, a network of training centers inside its own stores to prepare associates and managers. In 2018, it added Live Better U, a program that let employees study for a college degree for a dollar a day.

What you can learn: training isn't just for managers and technical profiles. Investing in frontline employees, the people who serve customers, has a direct effect on service and retention.

8. Unilever: learning by moving around the company

Unilever launched Flex Experiences, an internal platform that connects employees with projects in other areas based on their skills and interests. Instead of taking a course, people learn by spending a few hours or weeks on a challenge outside their usual role.

What you can learn: on-the-job experience is the most powerful form of learning there is. Organizing it, rather than leaving it to chance, turns it into a development program.

9. Disney: training as a brand signature

Disney created the Disney Institute in 1986 to teach other companies its approach to customer service, leadership and culture. When a company sells others the way it trains its own people, it says a lot about how central training is to its service.

What you can learn: when customer experience is your competitive advantage, customer service training isn't a welcome-day formality. It's something people practice continuously.

10. Accenture: continuous learning in a fast-moving industry

Accenture is one of the consulting firms that invests most heavily in training, with its own continuous learning programs to keep its people up to date in technologies that change from one year to the next, such as artificial intelligence.

What you can learn: in industries that change quickly, training has no end date. It's planned as a constant flow, not as one-off courses.

What these programs have in common

Beyond their budgets, these ten examples share four traits that any company can adopt:

• They start from strategy. They train people in what the company will need, not in what's fashionable. The first step is a proper training needs analysis.
• They connect training to careers. Learning opens doors inside the company, which motivates people more than any internal campaign.
• They put practice at the center. Real projects, time with colleagues, employees who teach: almost none of them rely on theory-based courses alone.
• They measure impact. Big investments in training last because they show results. Our article on measuring the impact of training programs covers the key indicators.

How to apply these ideas without a multinational's budget

You don't need a campus or hundreds of millions to apply these lessons. A mid-sized company can start by identifying its best people and giving them a role as trainers, as Google does. It can link every promotion to a learning path, as McDonald's does, or open up internal projects so people learn by working in other areas, as Unilever does. Our guide to workforce development programs explains how to build one step by step, and our article on management training and development focuses on new and middle managers.

It can also give everyone, including frontline staff, practical training in the skills that matter most in their work. That's where training video games and simulations are especially useful: they let people practice in realistic situations, at any scale and without travel. We explain how in our guide to training simulations, and you'll find more examples in 10 companies using gamification to train their teams.

Our catalog includes more than 70 training video games in skills such as leadership, negotiation and customer service, available in up to 20 languages. Book your demo and we'll help you design your program.

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