Unlocking Career Growth: How IQVIA drives mobility, engagement and retention at scale

At The Career Innovation Company’s latest roundtable, we were delighted to welcome Beatriz Barranco, Senior Director and Elese Rodriguez, Programme Manager, Global Talent and Learning from IQVIA. Together, they explained their organisation’s talent and career growth strategies. And they demonstrated how the ‘Be Bold in your career’ programme has had a transformative impact, with outcomes aligned to their strategic goals, in a culture where employees can navigate their career journey.

IQVIA’s talent strategy: Build, Buy, Borrow.

To create a dynamic and adaptable workforce, IQVIA has developed a three-pronged talent strategy:

• Build. This means investing in internal development through comprehensive training, targeted programmes to bridge skills gaps, and customised career development support.
• Buy. Sometimes, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit external talent to introduce fresh expertise to meet the organisation’s skills needs.
• Borrow. This involves using flexible workforce models to meet shifting business needs.

This balanced ‘3Bs’ approach helps IQVIA to meet often fast-changing needs by developing existing talent, while integrating external capabilities when required.

A model for career growth.

IQVIA has brought the ‘Build’ part of its talent strategy to life, with the help of a four-stage career development model:

• Explore opportunities
• Develop future skills
• Practice those skills on the job
• Progress your career

Each of these stages is linked to a variety of IQVIA’s development resources and programmes. And while this is a model, it is designed to be flexible enough to meet individual employees wherever they are in their career – and so allows them to take ownership of their journey.

The impact of ‘Be Bold in your career.’

‘Be Bold in your career’ is a key programme offering under the ‘Explore’ part of IQVIA’s career strategy. Developed in partnership with The Career Innovation Company, it empowers employees to be proactive about their career growth and is delivered at scale. Designed as a blended learning experience, it combines online learning, live webinars, and peer coaching.

Key elements of the programme have included:

• Communication and change management. A structured approach to messaging that ensures that employees, managers, and HR teams are aligned on programme expectations.
• Seamless onboarding. The use of dedicated overview sessions to support employees and managers in understanding their roles in supporting career development.
• Content optimisation. This involves feedback loops, which drive continuous improvements to the user experience and relevance of each programme.
• Measuring success. IQVIA uses the Kirkpatrick model (which measures effectiveness on four levels: reaction, learning, behaviour and results). Behavioural impact and results are measured with their workforce analytics platform – they’ve seen that those who complete Be Bold have a higher rate of internal mobility, engagement, and retention compared to the general IQVIA population.
• IQVIA Partnership. The ‘Be Bold’ initiative complements existing IQVIA career resources and reinforces its broader career development framework.

A culture of continuous improvement

A key driver of the programme’s success has been IQVIA’s commitment to continuous improvement. Over time, improvements have been made in response to employee feedback, including:

• Technology upgrades. This includes improving accessibility, for example with single sign-on and a shift from Adobe Connect to Microsoft Teams.
• Expanded resources. IQVIA introduced a dedicated career development resource guide and featured alumni speakers in learning sessions.
• Additional communications. This meant improving outreach to both employees and managers to improve engagement and program visibility.

By showing its commitment to improvement, IQVIA ensured that ‘Be Bold in your career’ was an impactful experience, aligned with business needs. And crucially it gave employees, normally caught up in their day-to-day tasks, the space and time to think about how they want to build their careers and the skills they needed to get there.

Participants have reported significant benefits, with many gaining increased confidence in their ability to shape their careers. One attendee described the experience as a turning point:

“This course reconfirmed what I need to do to develop my career and has given me more confidence and made me realize that my career aspirations are possible.”

Our View: Connecting careers to business outcomes.

Part of our roundtable was spent discussing the importance of making a clear link between career development initiatives and business objectives. This is the ‘Theory of Change’ – a structured method for mapping the impact of career interventions.

• Defining outcomes first is really important because it then allows any organisation to work ‘backwards’ from outcomes to work out how they can be achieved.
• This in turn necessitates a diagram to explain how any programme of action has an impact on its beneficiaries that creates these outcomes.
• This then embeds a causal framework, showing how specific career activities drive engagement, productivity and internal mobility.
• And in doing this, it becomes clear that the process is as important as its product, because it reveals to the organisation the assumptions that need to be tested – and the preconditions necessary to ensure success.

Looking at new career initiatives in this way, organisations can ensure that they move beyond being well-intentioned and onto becoming essential drivers of workforce agility and long-term business success. IQVIA’s approach to careers is a great example of how well this can work. It demonstrates how structured, scalable interventions can drive real impact, benefiting both employees and the organisation and ultimately strengthening the business from within with both speed and scale.