What Early Career Development Has Been, and What It's Becoming

I started off this year with a big question on my mind: how is early career development evolving?

Early career development is not the same today as it was a few years ago

I left Corporate America and started my own company right before AI became a big strategic shift for companies. Right before the tech world started down a path of significant layoffs and budget cuts. Right before a series of political and economic events that would impact how companies and individuals operate.

While I felt like I had a good pulse on what early career development has been, I had an urge to really get curious and understand from others how they are seeing early career development evolve and their predictions on the future.

Over the past six months, I interviewed people who are closest to early career employees: those who build early career development programs, those who lead university recruiting efforts, those who consult with companies on early career development, and those at universities who support students actively looking for internships and full-time roles. Based on my interviews, I also dug into published research about the themes that were coming up in conversations.

The result is a report called The State of Early Career Development, and it is available today.

What this is (and isn’t)

First, let me tell you what this report is not.

I am not a researcher in the traditional sense. I did not survey a thousand people. There is no sample size here that would satisfy a journal, no control group, no peer review, no methodology section. I am a facilitator and a program designer who has spent a lot of time watching how people behave, and I went and had a lot of conversations with other people who do the same thing. Where published research exists, I cited it, and there is a full reference list at the end of the report.

This is a chance to hear what a group of people closest to this work are seeing right now, filtered through the perspective of someone who has been in the room with hundreds of early career employees. Some of the report may confirm what you have been sensing but have not had language for. Some of the report may not match what you have been noticing, and that mismatch is useful information about your organization.

Lean in to your own curiosity

I did not write this so you would read it and go build something on Monday. I have been in enough organizations to know how that goes. Somebody reads a report, gets energized, launches an initiative that addresses a symptom, and everyone is exhausted by March.

I wrote it in hopes that it would spark your own curiosity.

Curiosity sits at the center of everything I teach, and not as a nice idea. It is the behavior that most reliably separates the early career employees who accelerate from the ones who stall, and I think it works the same way for organizations. The companies that are getting this right are not the ones with the best program. They are the ones still asking honest questions about what their own system is producing.

So read the report against your own company. What is already working? What is not working? What surprised you? That last question is my favorite.

To make that easier, the report comes with a nine-question companion resource, built from the insights in the full report. If you only have a few minutes, start there.

Thank you

Every practitioner I spoke with gave me 45 minutes or more of their time and got nothing out of it except the chance to think out loud with somebody who cared about the same problem. Several of them were candid about things that are not always easy to say out loud about their own organizations. This report does not exist without them and I am genuinely grateful.

Final thoughts

I also want to be clear that I probably didn’t get everything right.

If something in here does not match what you are seeing, I want to hear it. If you think I overweighted a finding, or missed something obvious, or drew a conclusion the evidence does not support, that is the most useful message you could send me. This is the 2026 edition, which implies there will be a 2027 one, and the only way that gets better is if people who disagree with me say so.

You can get the report and the nine questions here. It is free. Drop your email, read the report, and then if you choose, tell me what you think.