For a firm like JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle), staying on top of the commercial real estate sector means having a tech workforce that can actually build what’s next. It’s a constant challenge. With generative AI and advanced analytics changing the game, good talent development isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a survival strategy. So, how does a global company like JLL actually manage to grow and keep its tech talent?
Key Takeaways
- Build a structured upskilling program, like JLL’s Tech Academy, to hit specific skill gaps you’ve identified in cloud architecture or data science.
- Create concrete career paths and a formal mentorship program that pairs junior developers with senior engineers for real knowledge transfer.
- Weave continuous learning platforms like Coursera for Business or Pluralsight into employee development plans, and give people dedicated hours on the clock to use them.
- Encourage internal mobility so your tech people can move between project teams and business units which spreads knowledge and keeps them engaged.
- Use anonymous surveys and straight-up one-on-one conversations to get regular feedback, which you’ll use to tune your talent programs so they actually work for your employees.
1. Assess Current Skill Gaps and Future Needs
You can’t start building up your team until you know what skills your tech workforce has right now and what they’re going to need in the next three to five years. This assessment is a moving target, not a static, one-time report. For a company like JLL, it means thinking past the current project sprint and trying to see what’s coming in proptech, smart buildings, and data analytics. I’ve seen plenty of companies get blindsided because they were only focused on today’s tech stack, leaving them scrambling when a new model takes over.
To do this right, start by looking at your current project portfolio and your company’s strategic goals. For instance, if JLL is making a big push into AI-powered predictive maintenance for buildings, you immediately know you need people skilled in machine learning engineering, data pipeline development, and MLOps. You can check out Gartner’s HR technology research to see what skills are popping up across the industry, but your best intelligence is internal. Use anonymous surveys to ask your engineering leads and product managers what specific technical skills are missing on their teams. Go deep: ask about programming languages, specific cloud platforms (like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), and which data visualization tools are becoming mission-critical.
Pro Tip: Hard skills are only half the battle. In a tech environment that changes every six months, you need people who are adaptable, can solve weird problems, and work with other teams without a lot of drama. Make sure you’re asking about these soft skills in your assessment too.
Common Mistake: Letting HR generalists try to define technical skill gaps on their own. Your technical leaders have to own this process. They’re the only ones who understand the real-world differences between two programming frameworks or the architectural demands of a new project.
2. Design Targeted Upskilling and Reskilling Programs
Once you have a clear map of your skill gaps, you can build programs that actually fix them. JLL has done this by investing in things like its Tech Academy which provides structured learning paths. This is about creating curated content that lines up directly with the company’s tech roadmap. It has to be specific.
Think about it in modules. If you’ve got a JLL engineer who needs to get off a legacy system and start working in the cloud, their learning path might include a module for AWS Certified Developer – Associate prep, another on containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, and a third on serverless functions with AWS Lambda. Every module needs clear goals and a way to measure success, like a hands-on project or a certification exam. You can partner with vendors like Coursera for Business or Pluralsight, but you have to customize their content or at least supplement it with your own internal case studies. That’s what makes the training stick.
Most importantly, you have to give people time to learn. Expecting engineers to upskill entirely on their own time is a fast track to burnout and resentment. You need to block off specific hours each week or entire sprints every quarter for learning, and treat that time as a core part of their job. It’s the clearest signal you can send that the company actually cares about talent development.
3. Implement Mentorship and Peer Learning Initiatives
While formal training has its place, the most effective learning often happens through mentorship and simple peer-to-peer interaction. You should set up a real mentorship program that pairs experienced senior engineers with junior or mid-level developers. At a place like JLL, that could mean a lead data scientist taking an aspiring data analyst under their wing to show them how to apply machine learning models to messy, real-world real estate data.
You have to define what’s expected of both sides. Mentors need to commit to regular meetings (maybe 30 minutes a week) to give practical advice on career moves, tough technical problems, and how to get things done inside the company’s structure. Mentees have to show up prepared with real questions and challenges. You can use tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack to keep the conversation going between meetings.
Beyond the one-on-one stuff, you need to get people sharing knowledge more broadly through things like internal tech talks, hackathons, and focused communities of practice. Get your teams doing “lunch and learns” where someone presents a new tool they’ve been messing with or walks through how they solved a complex bug. With a global company like JLL, these sessions are a great way to pull in different perspectives from different regions. This is how you build a culture where sharing what you know is just what people do.
Pro Tip: Don’t force mentorship on people. Make it an opt-in program, but then shout the success stories from the rooftops to get others interested. The best mentoring relationships happen because both people want to be there.
4. Create Clear Career Pathways and Internal Mobility Opportunities
A perceived lack of growth is one of the biggest reasons people in the tech workforce quit. You have to show them a clear path forward. This means actually writing down what it takes to get from a Junior Developer to a Senior Software Engineer, or from a Data Analyst to a Lead Data Scientist, spelling out the specific skills, experience, and contributions needed for each step.
At JLL, these career frameworks should be published internally where every tech employee can see them. The framework for a promotion shouldn’t be a mystery. It should list specific technical competencies, like proficiency in Python or experience with GraphQL APIs, alongside leadership skills, like running a small project or mentoring a junior team member. Then, your regular performance reviews need to be tied directly to these pathways so managers can give concrete feedback on how their people can get to the next level.
Fostering internal mobility is just as important. A developer who has spent three years on a tenant experience app could gain a ton of valuable experience by spending a year on the smart building analytics team. You have to make it easy for this to happen. Set up an internal job board that gives current employees first crack at open tech roles and tell your managers that supporting internal moves is part of their job. Yes, sometimes a manager is hesitant to lose a great person, but the long-term win for the company, having a more skilled and engaged workforce, is worth the short-term hassle of backfilling a position.
Common Mistake: Creating career pathways that just exist in a slide deck. If managers don’t actively support them and integrate them into performance reviews, they’re worse than useless, they’re a broken promise.
5. Use Data and Feedback for Continuous Improvement
Talent development requires constant monitoring, evaluation, and tweaking. JLL is a data-driven company when it comes to real estate, and it needs to apply that same discipline to its own tech talent programs.
Start tracking the key metrics. You need to know the participation rates for your training, the completion rates for certifications, how many of your tech roles are filled by internal promotions, and, critically, the retention rates for people who go through your development programs versus those who don’t. You should also watch the average time it takes to fill a tech role internally versus externally. A good internal mobility program ought to bring that external hiring time down. Then you have to collect qualitative feedback through anonymous surveys and direct conversations. Ask people what training was a waste of time, what skills they still feel they’re missing, and how they would fix the program.
For example, if you see that a specific cloud architecture course has a horrible completion rate, that’s a red flag. Is the content too hard? Is it boring? Or is it just not relevant to anyone’s actual job? That data tells you what to fix, the curriculum, the instructor, or maybe just the course description. This feedback loop is what keeps a talent development strategy from getting stale and ensures it’s actually helping your tech workforce evolve.
Investing in your tech talent isn’t just about plugging holes in the org chart. It’s about building organizational resilience so you can continue to innovate for the long haul.
What is JLL’s approach to tech talent development?
They use a mix of strategies: structured internal programs like their Tech Academy, formal mentorships, and clear career paths all designed to upskill their tech people for the specific needs of commercial real estate.
How does JLL identify skill gaps in its tech workforce?
They look at their project pipeline, try to anticipate future needs in proptech and smart buildings, and survey their own engineering and product leaders to get a ground-level view of which technical skills are missing.
Are there specific tools or platforms JLL uses for tech training?
They likely use a combination of their own internal learning systems alongside external providers like Coursera for Business or Pluralsight, plus collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack to support mentorship and peer learning.
How does JLL promote internal mobility for its tech employees?
They publish clear career frameworks that show people what’s required to move up, and they run an internal job board that prioritizes current employees for new tech roles to encourage movement between teams.
What metrics does JLL use to measure the effectiveness of its talent development programs?
They probably track metrics like participation and completion rates for training, the number of certifications earned, internal promotion rates, retention of program participants, and how long it takes to fill tech roles internally.
