Across industries today, leaders are quietly wrestling with a paradox. Everyone agrees that capability is the foundation of competitiveness, yet few organisations are investing deeply in developing it. The reason is as familiar as it is short-sighted: the fear that, once trained, employees will take their new skills elsewhere.
This fear has created an invisible stalemate. Companies hesitate to invest in learning. Employees hesitate to accept training that comes with restrictive bonds or long contractual obligations. Both sides retreat into caution, and the result is an economy rich in potential but starved of trust. This only suppresses innovation, slows productivity growth, and erodes the very foundations of the talent economy.
“
A shared investment whose benefits extend beyond any single organisation, and which, when nurtured collectively, generates higher returns for everyone.
To move forward, we must begin to see talent development as a common good. A shared investment whose benefits extend beyond any single organisation, and which, when nurtured collectively, generates higher returns for everyone.
The Collective Action Problem
Across sectors, companies tend to behave like rational actors in a collective action trap. Everyone benefits from a skilled labour pool, but each player wants others to bear the cost of creating it.
This mirrors what economists call the “free rider problem.” Training produces positive externalities where the benefits of a more capable workforce spill over into the broader economy. Yet because those benefits are shared, no one wants to pay the upfront cost.
During downturns, this hesitation turns into retreat. Learning budgets are among the first to be cut, often justified as “temporary” austerity. What disappears, however, is not just funding but momentum. The long-term effects are cumulative: industries stop developing new capabilities internally and instead compete to hire the few fully trained professionals already in the market. Salaries climb, but collective productivity does not. The result is a cycle of bidding wars, burnout, and diminishing returns.
According to the World Economic Forum, nearly half of all workers will require reskilling by 2027, yet corporate spending on development remains a fraction of what is required. The system has become economically inefficient, locked in a stalemate where everyone waits for someone else to invest first.
A Smarter Economic Logic
Treating talent as a common good is not a moral appeal to generosity. It is an economic argument for collective efficiency.
Human capability behaves more like capital than like a consumable resource. It appreciates with use and multiplies when shared. When one company invests in developing software engineers, managers, or data scientists, the overall competency of the industry rises. That broader capability base, in turn, drives innovation, raises productivity, and expands the total market from which all participants can benefit.
Economist Paul Romer’s theory of endogenous growth rests on this principle: ideas, unlike finite resources, produce increasing returns the more they circulate. The same is true of skilled people. Their knowledge enriches the systems they move through.
When companies approach workforce development as a strategic investment rather than a social contribution, they act with different intent. They build shared capabilities that raise the floor for entire industries, through joint training platforms, common credentialing standards, and talent pipelines that benefit all players. It’s a deliberate way to shape the very ecosystem that they themselves depend on.
The long-term return is stability and adaptability, two forms of capital that compound more powerfully than cost savings on retention.
The False Security of Bonds
Many organisations have attempted to mitigate the risk of attrition by imposing training bonds requiring employees to stay for a fixed period after receiving development support.
While these arrangements may protect budgets in the short term, they undermine trust in the long run. High-performing employees, who value autonomy and mobility, often decline opportunities tied to restrictive terms. The result is a perverse outcome: the people most worth developing opt out of development altogether.
The unintended message of these policies is that learning comes with strings attached. In a market already defined by high mobility and digital transparency, this can erode an organisation’s reputation faster than it retains staff.
Companies should move away from coercive retention tools and towards trust-based commitments. Rather than tying development to legal obligations, they should establish clear learning compacts that set mutual expectations and signal confidence in their people.
Returns That Compound Over Time
The economic return of treating talent as a common good accrues in several interconnected ways.
First, organisations that invest consistently in human capability innovate faster. Trained employees generate ideas that ripple outward through ecosystems of suppliers, clients, and even competitors. This diffusion of know-how strengthens the entire industry’s innovation capacity.
Second, companies that invest openly attract stronger applicants. The best candidates are drawn not to the highest bidder but to the environments where they can learn the most. A reputation for developing people becomes a long-term competitive moat.
Third, former employees often become future collaborators or clients. McKinsey & Company’s alumni network is a case in point: thousands of senior leaders across industries remain commercially and intellectually connected to the firm that once trained them. What appears as attrition on paper often translates into influence in practice.
Finally, organisations with robust learning systems weather disruption more effectively. As automation and AI reshape the workforce, the ability to reskill internally will determine who adapts and who fades. The up-front cost of training is a small price to pay for long-term resilience.
The financial logic is compelling: talent investments generate measurable gains in productivity and innovation, and the secondary benefits in terms of brand strength, loyalty, and market reputation, produce value that compounds beyond traditional ROI metrics.
“
People will move on. But when they move through a system you helped build, they take a piece of it with them, and that value finds its way back, long after they’ve left your payroll.
Leadership Amidst Talent Mobility
The future will favour leaders who build trust, not control. The best organisations will make learning open and continuous, seeing it as a shared responsibility rather than a privilege for a few.
For CEOs and CHROs, this means treating talent development as core to strategy, not as an optional cost. The real advantage will come from a culture that keeps growing its people and, in turn, keeps growing from them. People will move on. But when they move through a system you helped build, they take a piece of it with them, and that value finds its way back, long after they’ve left your payroll.
Angain is the Strategic Partnerships Manager at the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), where he leads client acquisition and promotes GIFT’s innovative approaches to leadership development, sustainability, and policy advisory in the Southeast Asian market. Before this he was a Programme Manager and subsequently, Head of Editorial at GIFT.
