Large companies seem to offer infinite opportunities for growth. They attract interns and seniors alike with the promise of rapid career progression. They have learning tracks and buddy systems. There is a human resources department that follows up. Some organizations have dedicated people managers who spend entire days doing one-on-ones.

Large organizations invest a lot in talent retention and in-house growth. At that scale, it makes sense. It's easier and cheaper to promote internally than to attract outside talent.

Smaller organizations can't invest the same resources into talent growth. They attract talent, promising more rock'n roll ways to climb the ladder. An intern joining a startup gets to wear multiple hats and levels up quickly.

But as a startup grows into an industry giant, so does the need to develop talent in a more structured way. As the rock'n roll gives way for scale, levelling up organically becomes harder.

Often, startups will try to incorporate some kind of enterprise-class feedback system. They want to go straight from no system to bi-weekly one-on-ones, defined growth paths and tiered employee levels. The problem is that they have neither the resources nor the culture. It takes money and time to get there.

One-on-ones can be pricy. It takes a manager with 20 direct reports almost three days per month! As a result, these good intentions get buried in the day-to-day work. Meetings get postponed, and quarterly reviews are rescheduled. What should be a tool for internal growth becomes a drain on productivity.

As always, there are more pragmatic ways to get started that don't involve trying to roll out an enterprise-class process from scratch.

Here's how to start training in-house talent.

Set up quarterly reviews

If you don't have those yet, this is the place to start. A quarterly review is a moment once every three months when employees check in with their managers to discuss ambitions and growth. By formalizing this and setting a clear agenda, you create an environment that focuses on individual growth. Each review, you discuss the progress made since the last one and set the agenda for the next one.

A quarterly review is not as informal as a one-on-one meeting. It discusses what we set out to do three months ago and checks the progress. It also looks forward to the next three months. Plan 45 minutes every quarter with each employee and spread those meetings out over time. Don’t make the mistake of bunching them together at the end of the quarter.

Create meeting minutes for these reviews

While meeting minutes are usually a waste of disk space, this is one of those scenarios where they are absolutely vital. They act as an agenda for the next review while also giving you insights into the employee's growth. They allow both the manager and report to make decisions based on historical logs rather than the last review's gut feeling.

Create a page per employee in Notion or Confluence that only you and the employee have access to. Keep adding the notes of each review to the top of the document. This creates a historical log in reverse chronological order. During the next review, the top of the page is also your agenda.

Let team members rise to the challenge

During quarterly reviews, figure out together where the employee wants to grow. Sometimes, this can be as simple as learning opportunities and new technologies. Other times, it can be as tough as interpersonal communication styles. Identify a weak point or opportunity to tackle and make sure that both of you agree. Then, come up with a matching challenge.

Let's say you have a senior back-end developer who would love to expand into more front-end-related work. A matching challenge would be for them to finish a React course on Udemy. Or we could give them the mandate to build an internal admin report tool. During the next quarterly review, you can discuss their progression towards full-stack developer.

Often, team members will rate themselves higher than you would. If a developer believes he's a senior AWS specialist, but you feel he's inexperienced, these challenges are a good way to figure out who is wrong.

Setting challenges and tracking them every quarter is the most cost-effective way to get started with training in-house talent. It's a great first step towards a system of fully defined growth paths.

It's something that you can start doing today to level up your existing team members.